Day 108: Today’s the first day of the beta milestone. Beginnings are always hard. I didn’t do that much productive work. Oh and it’s a bit of a special day, since I’m going to write some stuff that I did last friday (which was kind of a day off).

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post, Alternative path for gamedev. Kind of a sad post, advices from devs that want/did get out the gamedev to a more stable career. It’s true that there’s more job security in more traditional software jobs.

• Quick video on how to get and receive good feedback. It made sense, it’s all about pinpointing problems and not what solutions you might want.

Tasks done:

• Posted on feedback friday (this was friday). Responded to some feedback I got. In the end I have a whopping 12 downloads for the alpha. I’m glad I’m not trying to make money, I would be really stressed then. It’s still depressing though.

• Played other games on feedback friday. It’s only natural to give feedback if you ask for some. So I played some games. Each time I forget how long it takes to that. I thought friday would be an easy day, but I still finished at 19:00.

• Archived the last trello sprint list. It’s a trivial task but it always feels good.

• Created the beta milestone draft. It’s a document that I refer to know what I have to do for each milestone. I tried to put all the things I’ll do for the beta. As always there will be more stuff that I didn’t think of. But I don’t know this time it feels like I’ve got it. I wrote down the stuff that was already in trello. Then I added what was in the back of my mind. Then I took the few feedback I have for the alpha into account. Finally, I played the game to see if I missed some things (and I did).
  Read the feedback I got for the alpha. Right now I have two opinions. One from a friend who wrote an email. One from feedback friday who filled out my survey. Both enjoyed the game. It felt especially good to see a stranger like it. I mean even if only one person plays it and enjoy it, it’s worth it right?

• Checked my budget. I had to verify all of this month expenses to calculate how much my roommate owes me for this month. Then it was a simple addition from all my accounts. I’m actually doing rather well. I’m like two month over my estimations. At least even if all of this was a mistake, it wasn’t a too much expensive one.

• Decided on the deadline for the beta version. I had a rough idea that I wanted to end in march. I decided for the 31st. It leaves me two months for the beta and two months for the gold. That should be sufficient. Even If I just grossly estimated how many weeks each sprint would take.
  Posted on reddit gamedev classified saying that I’m looking for an artist for my game. I tried my best to be honest and fair, by saying out right that this project won’t make any money. But I always feel weird about asking people for free things. However, I just checked, and I got a response! I’ll see if it goes well.

• After all that, I had some time left, so I decided to work on my portfolio. It’s not related to this project, but it’s still an obnoxious task.