If you’re making a game (or any other project/product) in your spare time, while working full time, you don’t have time to do everything you used to. Something has got to give.
Continue Reading →I meant to do this back on Sunday night or Monday (so technically more than a week ago) but never got around to it. Retrospectives are a key part of Scrum, and continually improving, so I think I’d better not skip it. In some ways, these retrospectives may be of more use to people than most of the other things on here.
Continue Reading →20:18: I know. I said I wasn’t going to do minute-by-minute updates. I’m just really excited to be back to doing some programming on my game for the first time in over a week. Hmm… now what to tackle first?
Continue Reading →Well, I’ve finally done it. I’ve got my website online.
Continue Reading →Sorry for the delays, guys!
Continue Reading →Today was the best weekday I’ve had so far. I didn’t do my sprint retrospective yet, but I did do my sprint planning. Then I got the camera movement working in the shipyard, plus I finally got back to making the grid work better. I still have a little more to go, but I didn’t have the frustrations with it that I had before.
Continue Reading →I wanted to get my next sprint set up today, but it’s going to have to wait. I had a person ask me in an email about what I thought the future of XNA was. I’ve actually had a lot of people ask that, and I wanted to do it justice. So today, instead of working on my game, I wrote up about 10 pages about what my thoughts were about that. I was going to post that here tonight, but I felt like I really needed to let it all sink in overnight. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post it tomorrow. And hopefully, I’ll be able to get my second sprint up and running tomorrow. And hopefully, I’ll be able to actually get my site online for the world tomorrow. So much still to do… and I’ve only got 89 days left.
Continue Reading →I’m feeling quite a bit better today. I’m looking at everything I’ve still got on my sprint, and I seriously doubt I’ll get done with all of it. There’s just too much to do still. But I’m finally back to feeling good and excited about this game. Getting some wins yesterday made a huge difference, and I’m almost done slogging through the refactoring that I need to do to have multiple screens in my game.
Continue Reading →I intend on putting together some information here about why unit testing is helpful, when to do it, and how to do it (at least, how I’m doing it in my XNA game).
Continue Reading →It’s now Saturday morning. My frustrations have been growing since about Wednesday, though I’m in a slightly better mood this morning than I have been for a while.
Continue Reading →10:28: In my previous post, I had said I needed to get a quick win. I got a win. It wasn’t as quick as I had hoped, but I got it. I wrote code to do plane/ray intersections. The code was easy enough (I’ve written very similar code before) but the hardest part was getting my unit tests up and running. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I wrote my first unit test on Day 9. It’s important to do.
Continue Reading →I’m tired. I don’t think I’m going to do anything today. Definitely not for the next couple of hours. If I don’t really get back to this until tomorrow, I’m not overly concerned. I intentionally planned on having at least a few days during the 100 days that I could just take off. It was part of the reason I chose 100 days instead of 3 months.
Continue Reading →Once again, I thought I could get this grid thing finished up today, but here it is now at the end of the day, and it’s still not finished. It looks awesome, but it’s not finished.
Continue Reading →As I was falling asleep last night, and all day today, I keep thinking about how things are going so far. I’m really frustrated. This is the first time during this experiment that I’ve been frustrated like this.
Continue Reading →Here’s an interesting little dilemma that I ran into today, as I was just randomly thinking about my game.
Continue Reading →21:40: I was at work until way late today. But sometimes, that’s just life. Unfortunately, that cuts into my time to work on this stuff.
Continue Reading →I keep asking myself why I’m doing this. I guess when I’m honest with myself, the reason why I’m doing this is just because.
Continue Reading →8:17: I’m back, once again. Yesterday, I tackled some stuff behind the scenes. Today, I’m hoping to make some progress on cleaning up a few loose ends with my combat prototype. Today, I’ll see differences in the actual game.
Continue Reading →I’m now done with Week 0. My little weekend experiment. It’s probably time for a little bit of a retrospective….
Continue Reading →I’ve been spending the last little bit of my weekend creating a utility class or two that will give me event driven mouse and keyboard events, as opposed to the default polling mechanism in XNA. I thought it would be worth taking a little time to outline what these two models are, what their advantages and disadvantages are, and how to make event driven events in XNA.
Continue Reading →Today is going to be an interesting day. This is the first day where I’m back in the real world. That means I don’t get to spend 6 or 8 hours on my game. I get 1 or 2 if I’m lucky. This is where a lot of people give up. There’s not enough time in the day to do everything.
Continue Reading →A lot of times you’ll hear people say, “It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.” Meaning you’re not trying to go as fast as you can for a short amount of time, you’re trying to maintain a decent speed for a very long time. I suspect that analogy is mostly representative of what I’m doing here.
Continue Reading →7:52: I’m back for Round 3! I just wrote up my earlier post about it not being a sprint or a marathon, but a relay.
Continue Reading →Right from Day 1, you’ve probably seen my talk about Pomodoro. The Pomodoro Technique is a really simple concept to help you manage your time.
Continue Reading →I’ve completed one day (only three hours) and I’m about to jump into Day 2. I thought it would be a good idea to reflect on where I am at this point in time.
Continue Reading →10:22: I’ve been at it for another half hour now. I’m working on figuring out how to get ships to move to a particular location. This, of course, is one of the key building blocks to a space RTS game. It will be necessary to be able to do waypoint navigation as well as being a key part of moving to attack something.
Continue Reading →Here I am. I’ve finished a full day of work and drove across the state in a big snow storm to get home.
Continue Reading →I’m sitting here the night before my big plan begins. It’s Game Dev Eve.
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