Amazon.com Widgets Dev Diary 8: The One about Motivation
Yac on September 29th, 2008

As promised last week, I’ve attempted to deliver something a bit more interesting for this week’s installment. I’ve written up my motivation to go independent, so I hope you enjoy it.

Work Done Last Week

I made good progress last week, although it took longer than expected. I ended up working late into the evening several times (and a bit on Saturday), something I would ideally like to avoid as much as possible. On the plus, it didn’t really bother me to work the longer hours like it used to when I was employed. I was in a good flow, and didn’t feel like stopping. It was surprisingly satisfying. Still it’s something I would like to avoid, and I could if I was more disciplined with my focus. I’ll keep working on that.

A couple minor tasks didn’t get accomplished (again) this week, and once again, I notice that they didn’t fit in with the rest of the work I was doing. They were more like, “oh, it would be cool to also get this and this done”, but each time I looked at these tasks during the week, I kept dismissing them, thinking they could wait till later. I gotta keep working on getting a better handle on that too.

Overall, I made many physics improvements, significantly improved the performance of my game, tracked down one really irritating bug due to floating point accuracy error (that one was fun), and put a new build together.

Work Planned This Week

OK, so it may sound like I am disregarding my own conclusions from just a couple paragraphs ago, but I have set up another aggressive task list for this week. The key difference is that all the tasks fall under 2 clear, larger goals. One is physics, collision related (no more info on that, sorry), the other is regarding tools. My aim this week is to push the sandbox framework forward significantly. It’s partially laying down the ground work for future features, and making the current test environment more fun and dynamic. The task list is ambitious, but the more I get through, the better. The ones I don’t get done will just get done later. There are no longer any major tasks holding back the rest of development. I can attack multiple areas of the project at will. It’s a nice position to finally be in.

Related posts:

  1. Dev Diary 13: Milestone 0 Review
  2. Dev Diary 9: Working Overtime
  3. One Week In
  4. Milestone 2 Review

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