Thank you
At start, the progress was rather slow. I didn't know how to find motivation. That was the main problem. In my job I've found out agile patterns really effective. I wanted to use something like this but dedicated for one person team.
So I do following sequence every day:
1 (BEFORE SLEEP). create short backlog with few features to add (if exists, add few more). Features has to fit one day long work and can't overwhelm you. So they should be easy. Never let your backlog be empty. Don't waste to much time on thinking about design. It's always changing and you will get better idea later,
2. at the end of the day, get something from your backlog and decide to do it tomorrow. It's important to not do this at the day start. At the end of the day you are tired enough to make quick decisions and in the morning you already know what you have to do.
3. go sleep,
4. wake up, work on game for few hours (feature selected yesterday from backlog)- you are very effective in first hours after waking up, don't waste it,
5. go to job/life,
6. meet friends/free time,
7. work on game (you have to finish your task before end of the day),
8. document and publish your work. Videos are fast and easy.
9. watch a video with a result of your work (and comments if there are any). Game is not satisfying for you, but you see it going better everyday. That gives you motivation.
10. Back to 1
Programming:
- User some version control (I use git). Do commits often. Always after finishing atomic change. Your game has to compile and run on each revision. Sometimes you need to just drop for example 1 hour of your progress to go other way
- If clean coding takes too much time somewhere, do it dirty. You will refactor it later (when you need it or when you can't look at your ugly code anymore)
- Make use of TODO comments in code. It's easier to find what you need to do. Usually your IDE is supporting searching of todo comments
- Don't waste to much time on graphics/view but don't forget to work on it over time. At start I was working with just rectangles with text describing what it is. It's not that good because you are losing motivation if you watch only the placeholders for a long time.
- Always have fun. I've spent 15 minutes yesterday to set animation speed of main character to fit shopkeeper from crypt of the necrodancer. Why? To watch them dancing together xD
Maybe it will be helpful for someone. Finding motivation is a hard thing
Maybe some of you got more tips and would like to share it?
