Development Blues: Still in the final 10% takes 50% of the time stage... still an amount to do and Im caught between trying to make everything as good as I can and wanting to get the damn thing out for beta play testing. There are still a lot of optimizations and tweaks to do, but Im putting those off to work on once I get the thing in a near finished form. If I do them now Ill put myself in an endless cycle of updating everything over and over and over. You can put unlimited time into making something better, I learned that in the 90s with EVA - possibly the best thing I never finished. Even once out I have to force myself to realize that there will be a limit on things I should allow myself to fix and improve. A hard fact I have to remind myself of constantly: Sabotage isnt about writing a great game, its about finishing a relatively small and easy one. Its about getting something to work on 2 platforms at once and learning the pitfalls of doing so - not totally about bridging them, but learning about them and improving my approach for a game that matters. I dont mean that this is a throwaway Im going to put minimal effort into - Im going to make it as good as I can get it, but not going to try and elevate it to something its not. Its a rough around the edges retro shoot em up.. plain and simple, and something I can see through the entire process and afford to make mistakes with. Ive already put more time into this project than I wanted to - looking over my code backups, which I do every day I do a non-trivial update, there is a gap of nearly a month between dates - thats a bigger break than I wanted to take - its a break bigger than the amount of total time i wanted to spend on it. Taking a break from it is not an option - Ive unwittingly already done that. Im getting antsy - and I guess Ive discovered a problem with doing a simple project... although it takes less time to do overall, your enthusiasm level will wane faster.. leaving you in the same position at around th same stage. So what all needs to be done and improved? Still a couple of trivial PITA boring screens to write : Instructions and Options. A lot of polish work - updating the graphics for the android controls, little tweaks and adding minor candy effects. Optimizing the last of the game objects to be recyclable and yanking out the last of the vectortext code (works great on desktop.. not so great on Android... Ill fix it up at a later date), Everything else I think Ill make notes on and rather than rewrite huge chunks of this game, put it down as things to do from square one on the next.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 04:49:20 +0000
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