Wednesday, March 29, 2017

Progress is slow though inevitable, but is that enough?



I have a family with my wife and ~4 year old daughter. This makes me mentally tired quite often which is obviously not good for developing the game. Now I am an optimist regarding development and my attitude is that I will get there sooner or later. Well I am right, but also wrong.

I really didn't take into account all the facts, like the one, that I can not develop the game for too long of a period. I've already switched game library once and started to use javascript ES2015 version. If I spend a seriously longer period of developing it, then I could end up with a game that is out dated, already on the release day.

So I switched to working 4-days a week ~half a year ago. That was a good thing, but then even with 1 day of focusing on the development, it's isn't exactly fast. I took a big piece of the cake with this project and then there's also changing the workplace. I've practically resigned from my old place and will switch jobs soon with the plan to have 1-2 months of free time before another job position, to boost the development of the game.

The 4-days a week was a good deal and I have got my game progressing faster. But as an unfortunate timing, there were some inevitable events that got a big chunk of my time. I'm talking specifically about changing workplace (going to interviews etc.) and something personal that needed contemplation upon. Latter one came up during the last December and interrupted my game development pretty much totally for 2 months. I believe on the long run those are beneficial to me and thus to the game development, but on the short term, they did (and do) slow down the game development.



Luckily the summer is approaching and if you don't live up north (like Scandinavia), then you might not realize how much it affects the life here. People get a lot more energetic, when you get to actually see the sun sometimes :). There are places and time periods in Finland, when the sun doesn't actually rise at all. Summer will also boost my productivity during the next half a year. Even simply the need for sleep is less, when there is more light.

So my hopes and enthusiasm to get the game developed on overdrive, for the next half a year are quite high and I'm finally reaching a stage where I've got the main browser- and server-side logic working and can start working on the actual prototype / alpha version. So things start to look more promising and also more motivating for me (and all the millions of fans the game has... :))