One Habit That Will Transform Your Game Development Journey
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- Опубліковано 19 лис 2023
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Learn from my mistakes and discover the often overlooked but crucial aspects that can make or break your game. These strategies have revolutionized my approach to making games and have helped us make massive strides in our development of Samurado over the past few weeks.
Explore the transformative power of daily check-ins, the importance of accountability, and the game-changing difference between good and bad planning.
From the unexpected value of meetings, even for solo developers, to the art of effective planning, I share my own personal insights gained from real-world experience working on my game, Samurado over the past several months.
Whether you're an indie developer or part of a team, these tips can help take you from amateur to professional, elevating your skills and boosting your productivity.
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As a solo developer, this made me realize I should have regular meeting with my composer 😅
My brother do this once a week. We each have a "list" but we discuss what to do next week based on which things are "on our mind" it starts the conversation and allows us to bring up anything we might not be on the exact same page on. It's easy to have your own interpretation on what's "important" or needs to happen immediately.
We usually do this discussion over a cigar. This video reminded me how valuable this pseudo meeting we do really is.
Something I think would be cool is to do a 5m video every (other) week as a gamedev update.
Just saying what you've done or if nothing really got done what mistakes were made and lessons learned.
Think it would be entertaining, informative, helpful for others and yourself to just reflect on every (other) week
Just wanted to let you know that you're doing a good job with your videos! Your "dev talks" like this one are always things that I myself am facing with my projects. Kind of funny. Keep up the good work!
Thanks for the tip ! As a solo dev I have a big plan in my mind but forcing myself to organize and divide all my todolist by weeks seems great idea. Making this as a routine can be very useful to notice faster the most important features to focus on and have a better global vision about the game progression.
I will try to apply this to my own project and see how it can boost my productivity 😇
Great tips!
Im watching 5 minutes of adds to support this channel! I usually think what I need to do next day at night, so I wake up and dont need to think much :D
Great tip!
I would divide the topic into purpose and morale.
1) Morale. Checking with the rest of the team what is done, what got done, and where the progress is keeps everyone involved and i would schedule meetings just to share what got done. To be honest the video slightly irritates me because i'm doing this much less professionally than you do (right now) and me & the other person do more catchup meetings than once a week just by talking.
2) Purpose. I think this is advanced task planing and scheduling. The meeting described here is a coordination meeting. And while it it useful to have these, it is also unadvisable to have these meetings as the only source of that information. Priority and conditions should be part of the task board.
A task should have two traits:
- Definition of ready: the requirements to start with a task
- Definition of done: the requirements to condier the task fulfilled
and those should be in writing, on the taskboard. It's like quest in a game, the way to reach a task may be a challenge, but the goal what to do should always be clear. In an optimal scenario, it should be obvious in the task board, which tasks can be worked on and which are still dependent on other tasks. In our case, the taskboard has "deadlocked" as a priority above "important" and the tag list got both "depending" and "requirement".
Thx for this great video!!
So after watching the video twice, I guess I'm still a bit lost as to why it's better to start from the end going backwards? Do you set an arbitrary date for the future and then work into just how to slot in the work each week to make that date of completion a reality?
Also, one big problem I have with that is that for people (like myself) who aren't very experienced with game dev or how much time/work something might take this would be a really inefficient method. Despite having a workable idea for a game and knowing what systems are in place, I'm unsure that I could break them down into manageable steps that wouldn't just be vague since I don't know the proper steps involved for some of these tasks anyway.
Another thing is since game design is so iterative, wouldn't it make more sense to plan in chronological order? That way if things need to be changed, down-scoped, or just straight doesn't work out then you can plan for that without needing to offset the entire schedule?
Admittedly, I haven't been the best with planning recently, but what I've done in the past and what I think I'd like to do for the future, is plan out all the big tentpole dates that I'd like for certain milestones (and yeah, these are kind of arbitrary based on when I think I can finish stuff...which is usually wrong but I hope to be better with figuring these things out in the future). And then as I approach the milestones start planning out the necessary tasks to complete them. The one thing I definitely can get behind is planning out for each week so I know ahead of time what should be getting done. I have such a bad habit of creating out a Trello board and then not really allotting myself anything or just taking care of one task and then my brain feels that it's accomplished enough work. I think having set weekly goals would be really conducive to a better workflow for myself.
At my current job, we have meetings where we waste time going around the room going through the company's Mission, Vision, and Values. They expect you to be able to recite it on a dime. No one in upper management lives by those things at all, but they sure like wasting the developers' time on it.
hey, I'm a senior unity developer. let me know if I can help with something on your project. because you said it stretches/stresses you out :) no charge
You are?
Thank you for another motivational video! Btw, what does those 7 rules of life says on your poster? I can't read them, but would love to!
Why do you need the art for your enemies in advance to code the behaviour?
Can't you use stub art for that?
Yeah I was thinking this. The only reason I can think that you might wait for art instead of just banging in prototypes is if you need to know where certain hit boxes will be etc,, and you don't want to have to then go and readjust all your prototypes, but I agree waiting for art could easily be seen as a waste of time.
The patreon list seems longer than i remember, thats a "congratulations" i think. 👍
I'm going to politely disagree. There's no point in having a meeting, when the deciding what needs to get done part is not really the issue at hand. Procrastination is something separate from planning or sticking to a schedule (whatever the reason for failing is). And some delays in terms of implementing features are very natural. Sometimes things take more time. Not a big deal at all. Desperately holding on to a schedule is a problem. Being way too forgiving in changing a schedule is also a problem. But the latter does depend on how realistic a schedule was to begin with. I don't make schedules knowing already half of it won't get done in time. I try to focus on realistic schedules instead. It's more rewarding and generally makes more sense. And no, a 2 person team does not need meetings. Just make a list, add a name and done. If there's ever a need for a discussion, use the Monday morning. But limit yourself to 30-60 minutes only. Everything else is just a total and complete waste of time, pretending to be busy when not. Same goes for a 1 person 'team'. You only need a realistic schedule. And it is very easy to waste a lot of time with endless 'to do' lists or feature lists, when a lot of times you can comment stuff in code when programming, pick up where you left from there and so on. When it comes to game design, it's probably still best to prototype the idea and discard what doesn't work, versus endless lists of ideas on paper. Spoiler: many ideas on paper, don't work in practise.
There's also effectively no difference between planning from the end goal going backwards. Especially when the one thing most indie devs are flexible with, will be the release date of their game. Most indie devs have literally no idea what type of time it takes to implement all sorts of features, from very fundamental things all the way to more optional features later on. Obviously depending on experience, but in general it is true. So it is better to plan in a more abstract way and narrow down on things the more defined they become when working on them. (I would recommend watching Game Jam devlogs, you'll see what I mean there when people have like a 48hr deadline).
For some people very long to-do lists work fine. For others it just becomes a pointless list where most things get delayed again and again. The amateur or pro thing here is within what makes up a realistic schedule for you or your team. It has nothing to do with the amount of bullet points on a to-do list or whether or not the end goal was the first thing you considered when filling up a schedule. Needless to say, a 'pro' will be able to (hopefully) make a more accurate prediction of how much time something will take. Something that has more to do with experience and skills, than the ability to fill up a schedule in a certain order.
7:10 or.... you could have been using placeholder art that you can swap out with more final art later. It solves the issue of waiting for art to be done.
+1 for using placeholders. A game visually as simple as this does work well in design phase with placeholder graphics, black and white sketch would already be more than enough, as characters seem to be only static sprites which wobble a bit. Better be agile and make no fuzz about being formal, no need to try to act like a production house when its a two person operation IMHO. And no point creating something into final shape, if it may be discarded if those characters don't make sense gameplay-wise.
“A 2 person team doesn’t need meetings. If you need to discus something it should be on a Monday and be 30-60 minutes long.” Hate to break it to you but that’s basically the definition of a meeting.
Schedules and planning would be very useful to me, but I know for a fact I will forget to use them if I do the work.
I watched this video twice as the first time I was so anxious about the dude in the pool…
You’ve literally described a Sprint lol
well I really don't want to admit it but yeah, I have a really bad plan on making games... this brain of mine is just thinking too much things at once, and when it used on planning, I screwed up.
and now I realize I don't really have that much time to continue my plan, well I really want to put it on pause. but just somewhere in my heart just can't let it go, I might be able to let it go by doing something else, but every time people asked me about game dev, I just remember it, and I know I wanted to complete it.
If you're failing to plan you are planning to fail
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