2015: What Happened Part I
This is something I've been doing year after year as long as I can remember (like 2 years I think) so I might as well keep up the tradition. It's time to go over 2015 and figure out how much of a mess it was! It's going to be a wonderful trip down memory lane three months at a time...
To start things off for 2015 I signed up for toggl which is a neat time tracking thing. I only use the free version and I've been tracking things in broad categories, but I think this turned out to be a pretty good idea because I can finally see how much time I'm spending on various things throughout the day, week, month, and year.
This month was also apparently when I first prototyped the game idea I'm currently working on now! So I've already been working on this game for about a year... I don't know how I feel about that. Time goes so fast and I hate it.
Toward the end of the month I worked on a tool to use Google Spreadsheets to sync data with my games. I ended up making an external tool for Visual Studio that can end up parsing a google spreadsheet and turning it into a .cs file full of data. A lot of people seem weirded out by this but I guess when you're working solo having all of your assets embedded into the code with autocomplete and intellisense options is really handy.
I also was able to finish a new splash page for my website which features my game first and my blog second. I felt like a lot of people were probably coming to my site to find my games so I wanted to put those first and foremost.
February was heavily spent on the new version of Super Sky Sisters which I have... uh... still failed to release. I also worked a bunch on Otter and pushed a lot of neat updates.
(What's great about writing this post is that I'm going back and looking at what I posted and I'm totally rediscovering what I was doing that month.)
I also dove into more shader stuff for Sky Sisters as I worked on the background sky for the game. What's funny now is that I don't even know if this will end up being the final background for when the game actually does come out someday.
Not a whole lot else other than more Super Sky Sisters work going on for February, which in retrospect seems really nice. Focusing on one thing for a month feels pretty good usually!
Some part of March was spent at Game Developers Conference, and if I recall correctly I got super duper sick this year. Recovering from traveling and getting sick took a little bit longer than usual, but I did get back into it and continued work on making some cool boss monsters for Sky Sisters.
More work went into the menus and making them feel all neat and stuff with a fancy transition. Having a cool transition that isn't just a fade out and fade back can really add a lot of personality to a game!
Another whole month spent on one game? What a miracle. Toward the end of the month I was laying out the rest of the menu and hud stuff, like stats and hud options and everything a real video game needs.
Things were looking pretty good at the start of the year and I was doing a lot of work on Sky Sisters! But what will happen next? Will I keep up this pace or will I be side tracked down a dark path into oblivion? Find out in the next episode.
January
To start things off for 2015 I signed up for toggl which is a neat time tracking thing. I only use the free version and I've been tracking things in broad categories, but I think this turned out to be a pretty good idea because I can finally see how much time I'm spending on various things throughout the day, week, month, and year.
This month was also apparently when I first prototyped the game idea I'm currently working on now! So I've already been working on this game for about a year... I don't know how I feel about that. Time goes so fast and I hate it.
Toward the end of the month I worked on a tool to use Google Spreadsheets to sync data with my games. I ended up making an external tool for Visual Studio that can end up parsing a google spreadsheet and turning it into a .cs file full of data. A lot of people seem weirded out by this but I guess when you're working solo having all of your assets embedded into the code with autocomplete and intellisense options is really handy.
I also was able to finish a new splash page for my website which features my game first and my blog second. I felt like a lot of people were probably coming to my site to find my games so I wanted to put those first and foremost.
February
February was heavily spent on the new version of Super Sky Sisters which I have... uh... still failed to release. I also worked a bunch on Otter and pushed a lot of neat updates.
(What's great about writing this post is that I'm going back and looking at what I posted and I'm totally rediscovering what I was doing that month.)
I also dove into more shader stuff for Sky Sisters as I worked on the background sky for the game. What's funny now is that I don't even know if this will end up being the final background for when the game actually does come out someday.
Not a whole lot else other than more Super Sky Sisters work going on for February, which in retrospect seems really nice. Focusing on one thing for a month feels pretty good usually!
March
Some part of March was spent at Game Developers Conference, and if I recall correctly I got super duper sick this year. Recovering from traveling and getting sick took a little bit longer than usual, but I did get back into it and continued work on making some cool boss monsters for Sky Sisters.
More work went into the menus and making them feel all neat and stuff with a fancy transition. Having a cool transition that isn't just a fade out and fade back can really add a lot of personality to a game!
Another whole month spent on one game? What a miracle. Toward the end of the month I was laying out the rest of the menu and hud stuff, like stats and hud options and everything a real video game needs.
Things were looking pretty good at the start of the year and I was doing a lot of work on Sky Sisters! But what will happen next? Will I keep up this pace or will I be side tracked down a dark path into oblivion? Find out in the next episode.
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