Getting more done

written on January 31, 2011

I'm a total efficiency freak, always looking and exploring ways of getting out the most of my personal time.

Also, I happen to have the bad habit of working on at least 2-3 personal projects simultaneously at any given time and toying with a lot more ideas which have been partially/fully abandoned or just placed in the back-burner until further directions.

Considering that I have a "full-time" job, my time is rather limited and my activities resume to hacking a few hours (sporadically) after work during work days (Monday-Friday) and extended hacking sessions during the weekends (namely Saturday-Sunday).

Project Queue

Ancestria

Ancestria: Winter Special is a mini-game we built in Flash using the open source Flex SDK, will hit the web with full source code very soon. Stay tuned.

It's a match at least three or more of the same color game with a twist.

Language: Action Script

On the other hand there is Ancestria: Flux (a.k.a Episode One) action-adventure for the PC (Linux, Windows) and Mac, which is still in a quite early stage, on-going art-production (Melissa) and technology (me) .

Language: portable ANSI C/C++ (mainly Lua for scripting, but not limited to)

Lera3D

Portable cross-platform game engine and framework, this is directly related to the stuff above because it will provide the necessary game technology to power the game.

Language: portable ANSI C/C++ (mainly Lua for scripting, but not limited to)

Asseteer

Light-weight portable cross-platform version control in the cloud tuned for "game assets", combining the best of both worlds distributed and centralized providing command line and GUI tools, built with non-techie users in mind complementing award winning solutions like Git or SVN without locking your data. (data liberation is important!)

The meaning of "game assets" include raw files (PSD, MAX, etc) as well data in comestible format by your game technology, imported models, material files, scripts, etc.

Motto: The place of your source code is in Git and your "game asset's" in Asseteer.

Language: Python

Buildinator

Light-weight portable cross-platform continuous integration server with web interface, build queues and triggers (i.e commit), multiple build targets and a lot more.

Language: Python

Demos, Prototypes

Various other non-mission critical experiments/demos/prototypes which aid in a way or another the projects listed above.

Language: Various

Plan

My plan starting today is to work 1-2h every day (in the evenings) with no exceptions or excuses, on a different project, so my schedule looks something like this:

Monday - Demos, Prototypes, Research, Blog Update (post or cosmetics)
Tuesday - Ancestria (Mini Game, 70% ready)
Wednesday - Ancestria (PC, Mac) (work-in-progress, art production, when its done)
Thursday - Lera3D (work-in-progress, low-level core & graphics engine layer 1, when its done)
Friday - Asseteer (initial discovery phase 5%)
Saturday - Buildinator (initial discovery phase 5%)
Sunday - Nothing (relaxing, etc) or Random (Monday-Saturday)

Starting Mondays with something light-weight and totally unrelated, Tuesday-Thursday continuing with the important "main" projects (especially Lera3D, my baby), then Friday-Saturday Asseteer and Buildinator, Sunday is either "do nothing" or just hack on a random item from a previous day of a the week.

Most probably I will shuffle these from time-to-time just for fun :D

Closing

You may disagree with me when it comes to this one, but in my opinion working on multiple projects simultaneously can be beneficial for a number of reasons.

You don't get fed up with doing the same thing all the time.
You have the chance to tackle totally un-related stuff compared to what you worked on yesterday and this can be helpful if you are stuck with something, it happens all the time when it seems like you are in some sort of a dead-lock; by working on something else you might have a good idea (Evrika moment) or find a solution for your initial issue, or just how to make certain improvements.
You can look at things from a different (rather un-biased) perspective.
You can always do something "small and fun" which can give you a considerable "ego-boost".

I'll keep you guys posted with how this works out on the long run, it looks like fun :)