In my last post I had focused on the few most prominent things that I had learned in creating a very small scoped project. I had intended to follow up with a deeper dive into the more technical hurdles that I had encountered and insights gained but, now that has been so long since I’ve had time to reflect, that project is so far removed that I’ve decided its time to move on. During the development process I had made it a point to log and categorize my time so instead I will present some numbers that I had gathered on how I spent my time on that project.
The Goal
There are a few reasons I had wanted to track my time, the first of which is that I wanted to hold myself accountable for past tendencies and bad habits. As I’ve stated previously, I can easily get sidetracked doing art or jumping headfirst into development without having spent the requisite time doing proper planning and research.
Secondly, I wanted to define a process and test it – a small project like this would be a perfect opportunity.
Finally, motivation! When I get into a rut where I feel I haven’t been doing as much as I’d have liked or haven’t made significant progress, I can look at the numbers and see that I’ve been putting in the time. Though the fruits of my labor may not be readily apparently, the time commitment helps to remind me that I am, at the very least, putting in the reps. Time spent watch game development design videos and presentations is valuable and contributes to my overall success.
The Process
I start by created a Google Sheet to trach the time entries and then, to make it easier on myself, made a Google Form to make my daily time entries.
Each day that I had performed any game development or adjacent work I committed to creating a time entry. These time entries were rounded to the nearest quarter hour and categorized as follows:
Research and Learning – Any time spent watching GDC videos, tutorials, or reading up on game design practices – all knowledge gathering tasks.
Planning and Documentation – Design documents, notes, compiling ideas and Trello tasks.
Development and Testing – Any work inside Unity and Visual Studio as well as playtesting
Art – Any time sketching and creating/acquiring art assets
Blog and Marketing – Time spent here as well as networking on social media sites which mainly consisted of interacting on appropriate subreddits
The Numbers
So what did I do? Well the overall development took roughly 58 hours over the course of 7 weeks. Here are the breakdowns:
Hours per day
When I did work on the game I usually was able to work for 3-4 hours in a day and I am happy with that. Going forward I would like to see more consistency as far as fewer days and gaps where I didn’t do anything. Sure people need breaks but if I want to be successful then I need to make working on game development in some capacity a priority and part of my daily routine.
Starting out I had intended to commit 10 hours per week to working on the game and I clearly failed at that. Very obvious to see the early enthusiasm and the trend itself looks like a Gartner Hype Cycle. Since it’s been so long, I’m not certain if I got busy with work or if I was just my own failing. Something to keep an eye on and work to correct next time.
I knew going into this that Blog and Marketing time and Planning and Documentation were going to skew low – this was a project I made for myself so there wasn’t going to be any promotion and, due to the intentionally small scope, there really wasn’t any need for robust documentation. Overall I would say that I am happy with how this laid out though going forward I want to see more planning.
With that I think I am done with the Pineapple Platformer. The project was a success in that I got the value out of it that I was seeking and I got to see my kids play it. I’m hoping that as I get back into it I can start to use this platform for what it was intended for – a place to regularly compile my thoughts and reflect. I’ve already got another project or seven in the works so I am hoping the next time I read this isn’t months away.