Oracle’s Eye Development: Taking an Hour

Thanks to a comment from a previous post, I decided to follow the advice on GameProducer.net specified in the article 1 hour solution to any problem.

… decide that you won’t check email before you have done that one daily hour. Don’t watch tv, don’t visit those nice discussion forums you usually do, don’t allow yourself to do any nice thing you usually do – until you have took action for at least one hour.

So I did it. I set an alarm for an hour and started planning my next steps with Oracle’s Eye. Before I get to the results of that hour, let me just say that I couldn’t believe how easily distracted I could get. I’d want to check my email to see if someone responded to a message I sent the day before. I wanted to see if a question I asked on the Indie Gamer forums was answered. I even wanted to start a blog post! There were a number of smaller things that I refused to do during that hour as well. Still, I didn’t think that hour would be so difficult. Perhaps with practice it will get easier.

So how did I productively spend that hour? I started by trying to picture what I wanted Oracle’s Eye to be like when it was completed. I then worked backwards by trying to list each “accomplishment” I would need to complete the entire project. Among the subprojects: defining a level structure, creating a level editor, selecting a level, loading a level, playing background music, and playing sound effects. I also wanted to add animation to a number of objects, fix the collision detection, improve the frame-rate independent movement, and create a menu system. I want to be able to build the project for Gnu/Linux and Win32 from a single codebase.

Having all of these specific subprojects is a bit less unwieldy than simply wanting to “complete the game project”.

I then needed to manage what actions will be involved in actually trying to finish a subproject. I picked frame-rate independent movement first. Here is a portion of my next actions list:

Frame-Rate Independent Movement:
    - To get game time to run at regular intervals
        - find/read FRIM references
        - define # of milliseconds in interval
        - verify that the code already in place will run updates at interval
        - change/update code so that it does, if needed

That doesn’t seem so hard, right? Perhaps I’m leaving out some details, but the very next action is good enough to get me going when I do sit down to work on this part of the code. It might be all I need to keep myself going, filling in the gaps as I go. Otherwise, I’ll just run this exercise again to get a better next actions list.

I’m still surprised at how easily distracted I was. I’ll need to work on that issue. I have a sign on top of my monitor that says, “What is the best use of my time right now?” that I apparently ignore now. I do so many things from one moment to the next without consciously thinking about whether it is the best thing I could be doing at that moment. In the future, I think during the hour it should be ok for me to at least write down those things I think to do. I can remember to do them later when it is more appropriate. It won’t really serve as a distraction in that case since I can get it down on paper and get it out of my head. We’ll see.

In any case, forcing myself to work within the hour actually made me more efficient with the time I utilized. When I needed to look up something for my list, I noticed that I was much quicker about searching than I would have been if the hour deadline wasn’t approaching. It would take me less than a minute to get the information I would need. Normally I might take five minutes or more because I would check if there are any comments on my blog or check for interesting new posts on the forums. I had a feeling that each second counted, and for the most part I treated them that way.

The next time you have a project that is sticking around on your list for too long, try to take at least some of it out in one hour. Even if you get somewhat distracted as I did, you might find that the time you do focus on the project will be incredibly productive. For another example, I dedicated an hour to catching up on magazines and got through a few of them before stopping to make dinner. I might catch up on the last few Escapist issues if I dedicate another hour tonight. B-)