Day 150: Today is a bit weird. You see, yesterday, I forgot to write the sprint and milestone end. So I’m adding it to today’s log. But I also did a few things today, So I’ll also write those. But don’t worry to keep things simple, I tried my best to as inefficient as possible today. Ok, ok you got me that’s just a lame excuse. But I do have a pro tip for you. If you’re feeling down, don’t go check your twitter feed full of gamedev stuff. It’s quite hard to cope with all the amazing things everyone is constantly making in those times. Ah and also I think I caught the sickness of my roommate. So If I don’t write a log entry in the next few days, it’ll mean that I’m spending all my time in a coma like defense mechanism. But since no one is ever reading this, I should be fine.

Daily interesting stuff:

• Reddit post about tweets from Sergey Galyokin from steamSpy. It talks about the upcomings changes in discoverability. It spawned a nice comment feed.

• Reddit post on the new Unity release. Lot of hate here. Usual (and often justified) complains about the systems that take years to complete.

• Reddit post, “hitting the bleah stage”. The description of the post hit really closely to home. It’s about the time where your brain gets al mushy and you can’t work. But then you’re not working, and stressing about it. So you don’t even enjoy the time not working and it has no positive effect. It’s too bad that the comments weren’t more helpful (to me).

• Gamejolt april fools joke. It’s a page that details their new program called “redlight”, meant to finally solve the problem to see if AAA games are worth being on Gamejolt. I freaking love april fools jokes like these. This year the joke from NVIDIA and Razer were awesome too. In France, we also have a computer hardware vendor that goes out of it’s way every year. This year it was announcing the launch of a reality tv channel centered on hardware. They even made a trailer with various parody of current tv shows.

Tasks done:

• Cleaned up the last sprint. I archived the cards, checked the design docs. And other simple things like this. I’m really just putting this here, to sound like I did some work.

• Planned the next milestone. I started by creating a draft document. It’s even shorter than the alpha and beta doc. But it should fulfill its purpose. I also made the appropriate trello cards, and organized them. Finally I realized when writing this that I didn’t do a time estimation, so I going to do one now. Ok I did a rough estimate. I think that I need one week to add the finishing technical touches (small features), one week to polish and tune it, one week to try to improve the graphics, and one week to prepare the final release. That’s one month in total. That would place the gold milestone on the 28th of Aprill. Which is one month earlier than I initially planned. That’s good, that would leave my time for some little vacation before moving on to C++ game a week projects. But I’m leaving myself a margin of two weeks in case of unpredicted estimation errors. It feels weird to finally see the end of the line…

• Watched some CGP Grey videos. Damn those are so awesome. But then I got into the topic of super AI again. And while it’s fascinating, it’s also quite depressive. To think that it’s more than probable to be completely replaced in less than a lifetime. It raises some serious question, what would we do without work? Our current society systems are equipped to deal with this at all. Well at least it’ll only be a valid question in the time where machines took all the jobs and the time they’ll wipe us all.

Sprint end: This should concludes the polish sprint. But that was technically a while ago. But it’s finished, so it’s all the same. Now the game is neater than before. And I have a pretty solid beta version. Even if almost no one played it.

What went wrong:

• Planning was eartic. At first there was a lot of work, then I got lazy and hide behind my deadline to not be productive.

• Lot of personal life hindered my progress. And caused a lot of stress. Which I really hate.

What went right:

• Pretty much everything else went right. No feature pestered me, and it was really straight forward.

Milestone end: Ok, so now, I’m in beta. The game is really close to its final version. It has a lot more content, is more polished and way more accessible.

What went wrong:

• Really hated content work. It’s really a pain to make. And I feel like I’m not cut for this job. I think that I’m not a good designer, and that I’ll never be.
  Let personal life impact development. That wasn’t cool. But it was still important for me.

• Motivation drops everywhere! I felt like quitting a lot of times. The hardest moment for me is when I think what I do has no point. And for a while, I have the sensation that continuing this project is counterproductive for my career. But I’m still here. Because I don’t want to quit. I said that I’ll do this, and so I will. I have no idea if this will even remotely serve me to find a job, but by principle I’ll see it until the end.

What went right:

• I actually like the game. It’s crazy, but I do enjoy playing it. I’m really proud of it and yet paradoxically, I see it as a child toy that is miles away from “real” indie games.

• There wasn’t many bugs found in the playtesting. Only one or two things mainly due to the UI. But I’m quite happy. Maybe it means that my is code actually solid.

• Made it in time. I even had a few day left. I celebrated that by doing almost nothing (which is bad).