Devlog 5 - Sprinting a Marathon

I’m running a series of developer logs where I just write down everything I’ve tried to do over the past week, and share a little progress. Largely I’m doing these for my own self-reflection but I hope there’s a little humour and maybe even something useful in there too.

A friend of mine recently said to me ‘you and I are sprinters, when we go we work faster than everyone else so ‘normal’ seems very slow to us’. I probably paraphrase-butchered that, but the sentiment is there. I haven’t been sprinting this week.

Life gets in the way sometimes, and if you actually look at my commit history you’ll see that stuff got done anyway but when you’re just coming off a manic productive period it feelsbadman.jpg.

Still, Indev 12 (experimental release) is almost upon us, and I’ll be focusing on that tomorrow. I should already be in the next sprint (we’re focusing on ‘juice’ and ‘impact’ for the month of May, redoing some of the old art and adding visual punch to the game) but I haven’t quite gotten there yet. It’s a slow start, off of a holiday weekend, but so was April’s sprint and look how incredibly that went. At the end of the day, it’s all about persistence, nothing is insurmountable so long as you keep chipping away at it.

Since this was the end of my first month sprint I’ll lay out my key takeaways

• Don’t over plan. Some things will take longer than you expect, allow time for that.
• Sometimes work will go much faster on some days than others, you’re not a machine. Productivity comes in ebbs and flows.
• Persistence is key, remember - you may be a sprinter, but this is a marathon!
• Be efficient with your time. Any creative pursuit is a gas, it will expand to take as much time as you allow it. Don’t get bogged down on difficult changes that will have a low-impact, focus on the stuff that will make it more fun.

A lot of this week was bug fixes and minor improvements so here’s a shot of the build mode again; I finally fixed the ugly-looking original buttons that have been there since the first implementation.

The Great Train Defence is a tower defence game where you’re often on the move, and it often feels like that’s my life too! Drop a comment below or chat to me on discord, and save me from just having to talk to myself!