Freshly Squeezed Progress Report: Initializing a New Project

Last time, I reported that I was still designing and planning my next Freshly Squeezed Entertainment project, which will focus on clowns.

Since last week was the first full week of November, I wanted to get started on actual development while I still figured out the full project plan’s scope.

Sprint 2024-1: Pre-production and Initialization

Planned and complete:

• Get a basic project building/running/quitting

Unplanned and complete:

• Create a title screen

Unplanned and incomplete:

• Create a main menu

As you may know or recall, I write all of my own code. I don’t have a game engine so much as decades of built-up layers of bespoke code that I use as building blocks for my projects.

Unfortunately, it means that each time I start a new project, I need to disentangle the old project to create a new project.

It’s not as messy as it sounds. I’ve already separated out some generic code into something called GBLib. And when it comes to the game-specific code, most of that goes into a directory called GameSpecific, so I can pretty much delete everything in there.

But unfortunately there is still a small part of the game-specific code that gets into what should probably be a more generic area, and THAT’s where most of the effort lies.

Which frankly was still pretty smooth, and I made notes to try to improve the situation so that next time it is even easier to start a new project. The main delays came from spending time on other priorities (there was an election to reel from, after all).

Once I got the project building and running, I had a functioning but ugly main menu (much of this code is the same between projects) with an otherwise blank screen, so the next thing was to create a title screen.

So I created a few thumbnails of how the main menu/title screen would look.

I liked the idea of being outside of a circus tent, so that when you hit the Play button, you are indicating that you want to go inside. Having posters and signs for the other buttons, such as Quit taking you to the Giant Egress, seemed more fun than random floating buttons.

Then I spent time on implementing one, and…well, I’m not happy with it.

I know I’m not an artist by trade, but I feel like my programmer art skills are better than this.

BUT! This background image doesn’t have to be the final product. I can always improve it later.

For now, I have a menu, and I have buttons for it, and I’d otherwise be done with the Main Menu task except that the buttons need to have a few variations so that they animate when hovered over or when pressed.

Otherwise, I spent part of Saturday updating my project plan’s backlog with all of the scope I could identify upfront. I periodically had to create more mock-up screens to help me figure out what that scope could be.

Looking at my last two completed projects, I had identified over 100 different backlog items by the end. However, each of those projects took me longer than six months, so while it was helpful to look through those backlogs to see what kinds of things I should document for this project, such as tasks to create app icons and create ports and create ways for the player to toggle audio on and off, I also guessed that maybe around 50 items is likely doable in six months?

I don’t actually know. Some tasks are bigger than others, and I still need to estimate how big some of them are relative to each other. I don’t have some of the more complex features I was hoping for, such as the animation work I was investigating in the last few weeks, and I worry that even without them that it might still be too much for a six month project.

However, I am being mindful to front-load a lot of the core system and coding work in the first few months, with the expectation that later months are all about adding content. I expect this approach means that the project will be considered finished in six months no matter what, and the only unknown is how much or how little variety I can provide, plus how much animation the clowns might have.

Thanks for reading, and stay curious!

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