The Serious Art of Designing Fun

The past 4 days have been a whirlwind of application form filling, short snippet of conversations with ex-colleagues, and setting up my development infrastructure.

My primary focus has been on getting organized as quickly as possible. Without a steady revenue stream, any unproductive time hits me where it hurts the most - the wallet. As such, there were a few practices that I put into place immediately.

Follow up:

Based on my development experiences:

• Get a schedule together as quickly as possible
  In a time constrained environment, my primary focus is figuring out my deadlines. To that end, I've set-up a "war room" with two 30-day general dry-erase planners mounted on the wall. This accomplishes 2 goals: (1) it's in my face every day thereby lending a sense of urgency; (2) it lets me quickly plan out different scenarios before settling on one.
• Get into the development rhythm
  I may be out of a job, but I'm maintaining my regular 9-to-5 schedule. OK - so I'm lying. I've been putting in more than 12 hours a day since the layoff. I'm also planning to work this weekend. My hope is that I'll slowly return to a less insane development schedule come Monday. For now, there's a lot of environment infrastructure that I need to put in place.
• Assess your project's commercial viability idea before starting development
  Tanktics reflected a game that I would love to play personally. However, I knew from the start that the game had very little commercial viability. So, I've spent the last day or so scouring the web and forums in order to assess the commercial viability of my other proposals (I currently have 3 ideas which I'm exploring)

• Set up your processes
  I've settled on using:

  1. Scrumworks for tracking my day-to-day progress. I need a tool that can analyze and calculate the project completion date.
  2. Perforce as my revision control system. I need to ensure that I can restore project changes, that the project is portable, that there is a master copy, and that can eventually allow more than one person to work on the project simultaneously. I decided to go with Perforce and their 2 user limitation as I intend to develop the project wholly on my own. Since I suck at art, I'm hoping to seek aid from my artistic ex-colleagues in exchange for game credits.
  3. Either C++ or Flash as the development language - depending upon the project I intend to undertake (it's a toss-up right now). C++ has the largest selection of third party game-related libraries and engines. It would be a shame to not be able to leverage all those resources. Flash on the other hand is a high level graphics oriented language that is powerful enough to allow developers to implement AI.
• Make sure that the development machines are properly set up.
  Personally, I've always put all the project source code and object files into its own hard disk partition. Source code and compilation artifacts tend to change frequently and cause disk fragmentation. Disk fragmentation in turn slows down disk access which in turns slows down your machine's execution speed (most PCs execution speed are disk-bound). By putting all the frequently changing data files in its own partition, the primary partition containing the compiler and various other system executables should not be impacted as much. This translates to less down time due to machine boot-ups/shutdowns and code/asset compilations.

Tomorrow, my focus is on making sure that all my processes are in place and running.