As I write this hours before New Year’s Day, it’s raining outside. Weather has been unusual this season: snow came much earlier (cumulating on the ground in November), but then went away during a warm spell, making this the first non-White Christmas I can recall near Windsor, Ontario. 2018 has come and gone.
Around this time last year, I remember writing I would have a playable version of my indie game “True King” by the end of 2018, no matter what. I’m actually not far off from that goal… sort of. While the game is far from finished, it IS playable, at least for the first few minutes of gameplay. And I owe a lot to keeping my New Year’s resolution from last year.
Juggling so many things… well, it’s never boring!
I wrote an article last year about what my New Year’s resolution was: to keep track of my weekly time spent on things that were important to me, striving to spend 24 hours a week on those items, allocated based on the subject and its’ importance. Being educated in Computer Science, I consider myself first and foremost a game developer, even if only as a hobby. It happens to combine many passions into one: programming, artificial intelligence, art, animation, storytelling, etc. But I increasingly find myself unsatisfied with just making games: I also want to write comics, create short animations, draw. And of course, I have regular ways I like to pass the time: I have a ever growing backlog of video games, animation DVD’s and books to go through.
My problem was with time management: after coming home from a full-time job, I’m exhausted. I look at my computer. I look at my books. Unable to decide, I typically resort to sitting down and watching television. Another evening wasted. By keeping track of a schedule of things to do for the week, I can look at one place and choose to do something left for the week. If I had already fulfilled that item’s quota for the week, I look to do another task on the schedule. The goal is to fill the 24 hour-quota each week as best as possible.
A bit of a hack for ADHD-tendencies, it’s guided me well, especially since all the items on my schedule are things I actually want to do. After 52 weeks, I’ve recorded successfully fulfilling my weekly quota 40 times. About 77% of the time? Some weeks simply can’t be helped, either due to a busy work week, travel, or other unforeseen interruptions. I was aware from the start I would be unable to get a perfect 100% score, just working to get as high a score as I could.
And compared to previous years, I feel like I’ve gotten a lot done in 2018. At about 6 hours a week on game development, I estimate I’ve spent about 240 hours this year working on “True King.” At about 3 hours a week, I’ve successfully written and published 110 comic strips (about indie game development), enough for a small book, and with hundreds more to come. And I’ve watched well over 100 DVD’s-worth of movies (yes, I have a bit of a collector’s problem).
I’ve noticed some things while following this regimen. I assumed that most of the quota would be filled on weekends, but this was somewhat incorrect: I almost regularly fill 3 hours-worth on weekdays (including 8-hour workdays, that comes to about 11 hours of “work”), and 4-5 hours per day on weekends (half the time I spend on “work” during a weekday). It seems I still value sleep and opportunities to rest, so “working” a regular amount 7 days a week isn’t as natural as overworking for the opportunity to rest 1 or 2 days a week. Another issue is with which tasks get filled first: unfortunately, “game development” is consistently the last task I work on to fill my weekly quota. If not observing a schedule, I might not ever get to game development, something that matches my experience from 2017 and 2016 (before keeping a schedule).
Of all the things on my quota list, “game development” is the only task that genuinely feels like work. I don’t want to stop it though. Even if there are thousands of other developers to compete against, I still feel enjoyment to completing a project, and still feel there are innovations left to be made in the field (something harder to say about illustration or animation, even if there’s something relaxing about the practice). After years of development on a single project however… it’s expected that I would feel overwhelmed. Despite this schedule I’ve set for myself, I still find my game not completed, still have comics not yet written, still have my collection of games and movies growing beyond the rate of consumption. I could rearrange priorities and hour-allocations, but I really can’t increase my schedule beyond 24 hours without quitting my job. I simply do too much, and the best course of action would be to give up a task or two. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
Where exactly is “True King” in development? There’s a prototype main menu, letting you start the game. You can roam around an open world, including generated towns, although a couple important buildings aren’t modeled yet. NPC’s aren’t completed yet, but there are a couple hard-coded templates, including one you can talk to for initiating a strategy map. While the rules and interface aren’t fully finished, you can play the strategy board game until you defeat your opponent, at which point you return to the overworld. For the very first time, “True King” is playable beyond simply walking around, even if it’s still in pre-pre-pre-alpha. And I feel like the details to what I’ve described are within months of completion, at which point the gameplay loop is almost complete, leaving minor improvements in user experience to be made through iteration.
Why has “True King” taken so long? I am certain that I’ve dedicated more time in 2018 on development than I have in 2016 and 2017 combined. I’ve already been able to estimate that I’ve spend 240 hours on it in 2018. How does this compare to “Drew and the Floating Labyrinth” and “Unfinished – An Artist’s Lament,” both of which were smaller games? In both of those cases, I was a student, taking months off to dedicate working on them full-time, regularly working 50-hour weeks on this hobby in my bedroom for 4-5 months. That would suggest that I’ve spent approximately 800 hours on finishing those games. 240 over a year vs 800 over four months… the difference is staggering, all because of having a regular job, as required to survive. Or partially because I can’t be satisfied with a single creative outlet anymore: if I chose to spend 24 hours a week on only game development, “True King” might have been completed by the end of 2018.
If the games were the same size, then that would suggest “True King” should be about 30% complete (assuming almost nothing was finished prior to 2018). I would estimate closer to 20-25%, but that isn’t far off at all, especially since I consider “True King” to be a (slightly) bigger game anyway. This is another benefit to keeping track of my hourly output: I can better compare irregular work to a time when work was regular, and realize that I am making progress rather than stalling or running in circles. If I can continue to spend 240 hours per year, then I ought to be finished “True King” as early as 2021, or even 2020 if assuming that some work WAS finished prior to 2018. It’s a long way to go for such a juvenile project, but it’s a better estimate than I’ve had so far.
I do need to avoid distracting myself so frequently. I need to write articles more often on my game rather than opinions on the state of the industry. But I am making progress. I’ll continue using this process to track myself, and urge myself to prioritize my free time and energy. Maybe this time next year, I’ve be able to show off the game a little better beyond prototype screenshots.
Likewise, I hope your year will be productive and rewarding. Happy New Year!
