Time for another month end review. This one just happens to be in the middle of the next month.
Goals
- Write 3 Blog Posts Per Week and Publish 2 – Publishing for March was mostly on schedule, writing still has not gotten up to 3 per week and the buffer is empty. In fact this post is about a week and a half late with 3 publish days passing with nothing written. All in all a bit of a failure. Still progress over last year though.
- 1 Game Designed, Created, and Released Per Quarter – I spent a good bit of my time during the last week and a half rewriting the Meteor-Angular 2 code to Meteor-Angular 1. The app now builds and runs on Android without a blank screen. The other part of the time was spent figuring out how to deploy it to a Digital Ocean server. This has been done successfully as well using mupx which turned a possible headache into a much smoother process. I still need to work on deploying the game to the Play store
- 1 Book Read Every 2 Months on Game Design – I might have read 3 or 4 chapters of the The Art of Game Design. It was all excellent reading and the book continues to provide excellent ideas. Looks like this may be 1 of 2 books for the year.
- 1 Article Read Or 1 Video Watched About Game Design/Creation Per Week – Absolute fail here. Maybe watched 1 video and read 1 article for the month of March. No notes taken and no real memory of what they were about.
- Get 100 People Reading Evolving Developer Per Month – Again, no progress made. However I did spend time researching various methods of marketing and promoting a blog. This was sort of done instead of researching game design for March. Ideally the ideas that are used to market a blog or website will translate into marketing a game.
What Went Right
I have a game, however bad, ready to deploy to the Play store and deployed to a Digital Ocean server. This was the ultimate goal for the first quarter this year. This process has given me material for several blog posts. Also I learned a bit about marketing and promoting a blog. Now all I need to do is put it into effect.
What Is Not Perfect Yet
A lot of the time I plan to use to write, code, and read is on Saturdays and Sundays. In March, 3/5 of those weekends was spent traveling in a way that prevented me from doing any of these things. I need to plan some time during the week for these activities. My new mantra is “Pay Yourself First.” I spent too much of the time I did have trying to figure out a bug in bleeding edge tech when I should have just used a stable framework from the beginning. The final form of the game is not really a game. It really needs better writing.
Corrective Measures
Start every day with at least 30 minutes to an hour devoted to writing, coding on the game of the quarter, or reading. Probably do these in a rotation. Pick a stable technology for game number 2. I may hire somebody to write a story I can drop into the framework for Game 1 to make it more interesting.