Category: Game Development

Paper Burns: Game Design With Agile Methodologies gives a nice insight on the benefits of using SCRUM and other Agile methodologies to develop games. You can make games in weeks and months rather than quarters and years. After rereading a bit about the use of SCRUM at High Moon Studios, I was wondering how I could apply it to my own development. After all, I still don’t have Oracle’s Eye finished, and I started that project last August.

But like a lot of things I learn about, it seems to apply best to teams of people rather than individuals. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of techniques or methodologies for individuals to develop software, let alone games.

Are indie developers expected to just wing it with subpar techniques and figure out the best way themselves? Are we supposed to hire partners/coworkers in order to make decent progress? Or are there tried and true methods for single-person development teams? Pair programming is obviously out, but can’t other methodologies be tweaked a bit to provide a benefit for the lone wolf?

If you work alone, what tips do you have to share?

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 107.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 408 / 1000

Target: 462

I’m still behind in game ideas, but I’ve been making some decent progress with Oracle’s Eye Prime. The code still compiles, at least.

I’m planning on picking a weekend in July and dedicating it to development. Working in short spurts of time is nice, but I can get a lot completed if I can work for longer stretches.

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 101 / 1000
Game Ideas: 403 / 1000

Target: 441

Wednesday morning I finally hit 10% of my 1,000 hour goal for the year! As you can see, I haven’t been updating my game ideas list in a couple of weeks. I have been fairly busy and catching up on a number of things, and so some things have taken a backseat. For instance, I finally bought groceries so I can stop paying too much for lunch or skipping it altogether.

Oracle’s Eye Prime isn’t playable at all. I hope to get a few more hours this coming week to implement a few more low-level features so I can start concentrating on the game itself.

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 96 / 1000
Game Ideas: 403 / 1000

Target: 420

Good luck to the US team as they take on the Czech Republic in their group’s opener today. w00t!

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 88.75 / 1000
Game Ideas: 403 / 1000

Target: 399

I only spent an hour and a half on game development this past week. I left for Ohio for two graduation parties this weekend, and so I didn’t have Saturday and Sunday to do much; however, I did read and do a bit of thinking.

I have been pretty excited about a number of different projects, but I am afraid I am spreading myself too thin. Since I want to do a number of things, I don’t get any of them done, and as Henry James said, “Nothing is so fatiguing as the hanging on of an uncompleted task.” I need to focus on accomplishing some specific tasks and not worry about some other projects. Otherwise, I’m exerting more energy than I need to, and nothing of substance is accomplished.