I thought I'd just see how everyone is doing. I'm about to leave for the airport to go on a 3 week business trip. By the time I get back I'll be at 4 months since I started working on the game. I should be 33% done with the game if I want to have something done by the GDC career expo in March...
I don't think I'm even 5% done. 5-10 hours a week (pretty much as much motivation as I have on Saturday mornings) is not enough. I think I'm going to have to stop laddering on Starcraft and stop wasting time filling out job applications so often. I've also read pretty much all the books I wanted to and can put that time into programming. That should hopefully get me to 20 hours per week.
I have the majority of the major components from GCC in place with very little plagiarism with exception of the generic object factory and some macros. I didn't do any of the networking parts. DirectX is literally KILLING me. I saw a lot of the job openings I applied to wanted experience interfacing with Maya so I downloaded the student version of that. It's been a huge time sink for basically the last month and I haven't gotten anywhere. I may have to ditch that and continue with my sphere and tetra characters!
On top of that, I haven't gotten around to automated building and testing, which I wanted to do. I only have experience doing that on Linux, so I don't know what to use. I always made scripts and used crontab. No bug tracking either. I should get on that... but I feel like working on the gameplay will be more important for such a small single person project.
Most people I know just think I'm crazy. I'll almost certainly take a pay cut, have longer hours, less job security, and I'm assuming the benefits aren't as good. But, I sit at my job and dream about making games instead, so I feel like I should at least try.
So, we'll see how the next 8 months go. Maybe I should break it down and start hitting some landmarks. It's hard to judge how much time things take having never done some of this stuff, like DirectX.
Anyways, I hope you are all being more productive than me!
I don't think I'm even 5% done. 5-10 hours a week (pretty much as much motivation as I have on Saturday mornings) is not enough. I think I'm going to have to stop laddering on Starcraft and stop wasting time filling out job applications so often. I've also read pretty much all the books I wanted to and can put that time into programming. That should hopefully get me to 20 hours per week.
I have the majority of the major components from GCC in place with very little plagiarism with exception of the generic object factory and some macros. I didn't do any of the networking parts. DirectX is literally KILLING me. I saw a lot of the job openings I applied to wanted experience interfacing with Maya so I downloaded the student version of that. It's been a huge time sink for basically the last month and I haven't gotten anywhere. I may have to ditch that and continue with my sphere and tetra characters!
On top of that, I haven't gotten around to automated building and testing, which I wanted to do. I only have experience doing that on Linux, so I don't know what to use. I always made scripts and used crontab. No bug tracking either. I should get on that... but I feel like working on the gameplay will be more important for such a small single person project.
Most people I know just think I'm crazy. I'll almost certainly take a pay cut, have longer hours, less job security, and I'm assuming the benefits aren't as good. But, I sit at my job and dream about making games instead, so I feel like I should at least try.
So, we'll see how the next 8 months go. Maybe I should break it down and start hitting some landmarks. It's hard to judge how much time things take having never done some of this stuff, like DirectX.
Anyways, I hope you are all being more productive than me!
