I’ve been having a hard time doing and maintain my project planning. I am usually more productive in the short-term if I focus on a small area of code or feature and plow ahead. Trying to finish this game to a certain level of quality requires a lot of planning. The scope of it is giving me some issues. As I sit down to plan, the number of issues still to be addressed becomes overwhelming.
I’ve tried different ways of planning: a notepad, a simple word documents and even mind maps. I enjoy mind maps, but as you add more and more info, it becomes just a jumbled mess and becomes actually difficult to keep a good overview. Mind maps lend themselves more to small to med-level brainstorming sessions.
What I need is a system which tracks all my work, is easily updateable and self-organizing. On a more psychological level, a simple reward system helps my progress. Up to now, I’ve achieved this by writing out my tasks on a notepad and crossing them off as I complete them. I don’t know what other people experience, but I get so much satisfaction from the simple act of crossing off my tasks. There’s a cerebral satisfaction. This is very important to me from a self-motivation factor.
Here comes my savior: Acunote. One of my favorite practices at Evolution was scrum and sprints. Now I don’t really have much reason to have daily scrums since I’m on my own, but sprints are something I miss. I’ve done approximations of sprints (like the notepad task-tracking), but you lose most of the useful information: time estimates, burn down charts, progress tracking.
Acunote neatly ticks off two of my three system requirements. It doesn’t do self-organizing very well, but it does provide me with useful tools (tags, priorities, sub-tasks) and it automates most of the boring tasks (chart updating, burn downs, etc).
More fundamentally, it helps me progress. I want to knock off tasks, even boring ones, just to bring down that burn down line. It becomes a game within a game. I enjoy the automation and the progress tracking, and hopefully this will feed into other areas of productivity. It is nice to have a central area where I can dump all my tasks. I know I will have to review them every week as I prepare my next sprint so they won’t just gather dust. I can easily add new tasks from any computer using their bookmarklet. I can sync it to my perforce submissions, and to a bug tracking database.
It’s all about getting more organized. The more organized I am, the clearer my goals, the better I feel. It also forces me to be more precise with my estimates as I don’t want to overtask myself in any given sprint. And no, I’m not sponsored by Acunote (but I’ll gladly accept compensation). If you’re finding it challenging to maintain your project planning, I recommend you give it a shot.
Work Done Last Week
The planning and scheduling continues. It seems like it never stops. I also did a bit more work on the design.
A lot of my time was spent on administrative issues. I never thought looking for an artist was going to be this challenging. It takes time to track down artists, filter suitable candidates and contact them. Still I made some progress on that.
I also improved my video capture capabilities. I cleaned up the rendering code to (finally) handle different resolutions. It’s less taxing on the capture software to capture lower resolution video. Well, it appears that way. I’m still having compression artifact issues, but I probably should use something other than Windows Movie Maker. Another task for the backlog.
Lastly, I seem to be making some progress on the artist search.
Work Planned This Week
I am back into coding heavily. There’s a lot to get done. Parallax layers are high on the priority list. Those performance issues are still lingering, and need more work.
The design process continues ever onwards. It’s a continual iterative task.
The artist search continues…
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