Feb

Dev Diary 26: Six Months Later

Yac on February 23rd, 2009

I started my enterprise a bit over six months ago. This being my 26^th weekly dev diary, I’m considering today the official half-way point of my first year as an indie. Six months in, what have I learned?

Looking back, I expected to be further along at this point. I wanted to have a demo ready by January, and be working on developer hardware by March. Sure, there were several unexpected complications. The editor took a lot longer than I planned. And I had various setbacks with the design. All in all, I do not feel I am too far behind. At least I had the sense to give myself some leeway in my estimates. My experience has been that tasks always take longer than planned for. The old adage goes: estimate the expected duration of your tasks, and then double them.

If I could do them again, I would do a few things slightly differently. Obviously, I’d implement the editor properly the first time, knowing what I’ve learned since then. Actually, this exercise is pointless. If I knew then what I know now, I would have implemented everything in a third of the time and with zero stress. So that’s not really the point. I can say that looking back I have mostly stuck with my goal of addressing the highest risk areas first. If I can continue the same way, I’ll get where I need to be.

I don’t regret the software development decisions I have made. No, if I am completely honest, my single, biggest regret so far is not starting the enterprise with a partner. Part of why I did so is a sense of ownership and pride. This was my idea, and I wanted to work on it myself and own it completely. But that’s not really the full story: I didn’t start this project with anyone else, because I couldn’t find anyone to come on board. Being in Germany with limited contacts of course did not really help. Ideally, in a creative process, you want to work face to face with your partner, and my options were very limited here. But even for all my connections back in the UK, it is incredibly difficult to convince someone to take a huge risk on what was at the time just an idea.

So that’s my biggest regret. I think I could have benefited immensely from having someone more artistic and creatively minded working with me on this game. I believe that with the right partner, the quality of the output can exceed the sum of the individual contributions. Well, I do hope to address this issue at some point in the future. I’m going to need to expand at some point. In the meantime, I’ve tried to make up for it by talking to various talented people, and getting feedback from multiple sources. It’s not the same, but it’s been invaluable.

I am happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, but more challenging times lay ahead. I need to step it up if I want to get this game done.

Work Done Last Week

My focus again was on the control mechanics. I made some good progress on this front, I got the basic movement controls working. I am happy with how things are progressing (and I just had a very good day today, but more on that next week).

On Thursday, I finally met with an English-speaking business lawyer provided by the local Chamber of Commerce. This was an invaluable meeting which provided a wealth of information and clarification. I have been pouring over all the information I can find online, but the language barrier has been stifling and lead me to a lot of conflicting advice. This meeting put me at ease. It also helped that it was completely free. I didn’t want to drop 200-300 Euros on a consultation unless I really needed to. I plan on using a proper lawyer when it comes time to deal with contracts, but there is no sense on burdening myself without unnecessary costs at this stage. Young entrepreneurs, I urge you to consult your local Chamber of Commerce!

I will continue to push the administration side forward, but I won’t let it distract from my main priorities. I want my company to take a legal form, but I want it set up properly (and as cheaply as possible). This means meeting all the legal requirements, German bookkeeping, etc. I will keep working on this in my spare time, now that I have a clear path forward. I’ll put up more information on this when significant progress is made.

Work Planned This Week

The focus is on the gameplay and putting a demo together this week. I have stripped down my remaining tasks to keep the focus clearly on the demo. Render improvement tasks have been pushed back to the polish stage, and I am only focusing on areas that support improvements in the gameplay.

This will primarily be in the control scheme, and in the editor. On the control side, I will continue to experiment with different control mechanics. I feel like I am circling around a nice system, and I will keep iterating on this. For the editor, I will add support for more gameplay-specific components such as tagging objects and areas that have “special” functionality. Of course, I will also focus on putting together a good demo level.