Hi. This post is again quite quick and more just a notice that I am still alive, hard at work and remembering that the blog exists. I am saving up a lot of material for future proper tutorial posts, such as a demonstration of how I was able to use Tiled to quickly prototype levels in my FNA engine, or some productivity tips that I have developed and put into practice for this project. There are also some other notes I could write in the future, such as a postmortem. I also think it might make more sense for bigger posts to be made into full videos on Youtube, which would have more of an audience and a chance to help more people. I also started recording my daily scrum in video format rather than just audio too, so that should help me get used to making Youtube videos in the future.
I have been learning a ton while working on this month’s Halloween project, which will be released on Steam for free. I have to build a brand for myself, after all, and a free Steam game can attach a Discord link for a community. It would take time and some short-term sunk cost projects in order to build a following longer term, but that is just part of the game as a modern indie game developer doing this as a side business. Not going to post any work in progress screenshots or videos publicly though, as I read somewhere that sharing too much of a work-in-progress too early can be creatively dangerous for productivity.
Since it won’t take too much time, I could share a simple productivity tip that I find has been helpful for me the past two months. I will write a more detailed post about it in the future once it has been ‘battle-tested’ more through more full commerical projects.
So what happened is that I came up with the idea myself and it was partially inspired by the famous Pomodoro technique, where you set a timer to focus on a piece of work and only that work for an interval time of like 25 minutes, take a 5-minute break, and then do it again for a few cycles. I tried this technique a few times myself, and while it is effective for studying for an exam or stopping procrastination, I find that the constant break and ‘timer counting down’ mentality was itself quite distracting from reaching a solid flow state with my work. So I came up with an alternate technique.
I call it a ‘reverse Pomodoro’ or, if being cheeky, the Uovo technique. What you do is that instead of a timer counting down to the next break, you set aside a timer that counts up from the moment you start focusing on your task, which is then stopped or paused as soon as you take a break or get distracted. Your goal is to simply just try and focus on doing the work as long as you can. It is quite simple, and I find that unlike the Pomodoro the timer’s existence isn’t either distracting from the work.
When it comes to productivity systems, I love how healthy this one is due to how it is nothing but a positive feedback reward loop. I say this because you can take pride in both factors of spending a lot of time on a task or very little time completing it. In the former, it can feel good reflecting on the week and knowing you were able to sit down and turn off all the distractions like social media to just put some quality hours into your project. On the other hand, it can also feel quite satisfying when a feature or task that you needed to complete took much less time than expected, which shows your skill’s ability to be efficient.
I like using the application Toggle Track to measure my time. In my own notes I even state things like ‘I will now start the timer to focus on the coding’. This system, however, can be done anyway which you like. You can use a spreadsheet or even a journal with a stopwatch if you like.
This week I was able to average around 3 hours of focused development time on the Halloween game a day, as shown in the graph below. Part of me wants to push it to be a bit higher as I have more free time this period of the semester, but another part of me respects the consistency of doing it day after day as well as how much I ended up getting done especially working with a new codebase. I did not work on Tuesday as I had to take an exam on that day.
Another good benefit of such a practice is that it lets you develop a better sense of task estimation for how long certain tasks take through experience. For example, I know now it’d take my at my current skill level 50 minutes to draw the static background for the game or 10 minutes for a simple prototype of a platformer’s checkpoint system.
So that is the quick progress update for this week. Overall, just focused on my current game to be released this month but I do hope that the simple productivity tip here could be useful or at least interesting to the few people who do read the blog. Do let me know in the comments what are some other ways you use to keep track of your time.
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