Hi there ...
Two years ago I started working on a game in C++ because of Hand made hero. My problem is that I have very limited time to work on the game (about an hour or so every two or three days). This makes the development time for the game taking too long, and because of that I am feeling depressed about this. Perhaps I am approaching the development time scheduling the wrong way, but could you guys give me advice to improve the game development speed?
yours sincerely
mkaatr
Two years ago I started working on a game in C++ because of Hand made hero. My problem is that I have very limited time to work on the game (about an hour or so every two or three days). This makes the development time for the game taking too long, and because of that I am feeling depressed about this. Perhaps I am approaching the development time scheduling the wrong way, but could you guys give me advice to improve the game development speed?
yours sincerely
mkaatr
I find it more productive to work several hours in one day that the same amount of hours split on several days. Maybe find what is "wasting" your time while programming and try to solve that. E.g. if it takes you time to remember what you were doing last time and what needs to be done, create a TODO list with these informations, work on a task you can accomplish in the time you have.
I also recommend this short 1 minute video of Jonathan Blow explaining how to stay motivated and get stuff going fast.
Thanks for this everyone.
You might want to try to scope down your project (from your profile description it's supposed to be a RPG right?). Are you using a working graphics/sound/input framework or are you still developing it? If the later is the case, again, try to scope down. For example you could start with Snake/Pong/whatever to test graphics/sound/input first. Then you might want to delevop a game with AI characters that move on the field to implement Pathfinding and stuff. Then you might want to work on your level generator (procedural or own editor) as a seperate project.
Another way would be to embrace the concept of scoping down as part of the game design for your RPG. You could make an UI-based RPG with Narration. That way you wouldn't need to implement stuff like pathfinding, because your enemies are just static front facing images on the screen and a town would be just a nice background image. The actions you perform in town or in battle (attacking, visiting the store,...) would then just be displayed as buttons.
Another way would be to embrace the concept of scoping down as part of the game design for your RPG. You could make an UI-based RPG with Narration. That way you wouldn't need to implement stuff like pathfinding, because your enemies are just static front facing images on the screen and a town would be just a nice background image. The actions you perform in town or in battle (attacking, visiting the store,...) would then just be displayed as buttons.