After a very promising week 1 of my self-imposed ten-week crunch period prior to the Mr Football beta, I had a bit of shocker this week, primarily due to forgetting to take my morning medicine two out of five days. Without going too much into the backstory there, suffice it to say that my mind was mush for much of the week, ruining my workflow.
The other problem I ran into was related to that spreadsheet I devised for the first week. It’s all very well to compile a colour-coded visualisation of the “roadmap” to get to the beta deadline, but if you forget to include entire swathes of the project then you are going to run into trouble.
Here is the updated spreadsheet for this week, now in dark mode:
Not a whole lot of upgrades marked as bold text there, which is a bit dispiriting. I managed to get the tutorial feature to beta and Cutscene to alpha, which were the major items on this week’s to-do list, but I didn’t get to the level up popup or the Milestone notification. The major problem was all the items marked in italics, which I really should have included last week. If I don’t have a fully realised roadmap with all landmarks on it, I shouldn’t be surprised when I run into roadblocks. The Scene functions column has some crossover with the Scenes columns as much of the difficult work to do is in those functions rather than the completed display code, of course, but it should have been included from the get go.
Apart from the event modes and chat, which I have now shifted to the Beta column, I need to get everything in the first eight columns to gold, green (RC) or at least orange (beta) before I can feel confident to actually call it a beta version rather than just a flimsy alpha. I reckon this on-the-fly process of ruling things in and out of the beta deadline based on progress is one that every game dev has done, especially solo ones, so I’m not feeling down about doing it.
I started thinking mid-week that I had underestimated the volume of work still to do, and was losing focus on compartmentalised goals with the Tutorial touching on too many other systems. That is when shifting to a new area is useful, and I spent today on the Cutscene which ended up being a neat little project.
With this being my first crunch and as a solo dev with no one experienced around me to tell me what to expect, I have had to find out myself that keeping my own leash short is advisable.
Previous posts in the series:
Crunch week 1: Authentication and onboarding with Phaser 3 and Firebase