Whether it is writing or coding, the singular most important thing is to stay consistent. It is the way that large goals are reached and large projects are finished.

I recently read the Richest Man in Babylon which is about how to manage money effectively, but it had a line which really stuck out to me.

The narrator is giving an example of a man who has decided to throw a stone in the river everyday when he crosses a bridge. He says if the man for some reason forgets to put the stone in the river and remembers later that day, he does not say “I will put 2 stones in tomorrow”. Instead he goes back to the bridge and throws in the stone that day.

The point of the story is to save part of your income consistently, but it applies to any long term project.

A Schedule

This is not the first time I have heard or read (or wrote) about consistency and I did have a pseudo schedule before. However, I believe it is important for me to get back on a regular programming and writing schedule and stick to it no matter what.

So, starting the week before the new year I will be on a regular programming and writing schedule.

Side Note

Game #5 is almost “done” and I have learned a quite a few lessons from creating in Meteor JS. I will continue working on it for the rest of December and the next step is to see if I can get it to build into an Android app using the built in Cordova tools.

I discovered yesterday that a significant change has been made to the installation of the android build components of Meteor. You must now install the Android studio from Google separately, it is not automatically done when you run a ‘meteor add-platform android’. It does however direct you to the steps necessary to get all of the pieces in place.

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I sort of made this mistake with my current game. I started working on it by building a side feature that was not the core behavior of the game and then trying to build the core of the game around that.

Having the side feature was nice, but made actually getting the game working much more difficult. Imagine building a house and you put some furniture and appliances on the ground then try to lay the foundation under them. It is not pretty. It could be done, but works a lot better if you put the priority on getting the foundation laid to support everything else.

The Right Order

The correct order is to build as simple as possible playable version of your game first. For example if you are building a platform, start with a character that moves on the screen and jumps with a flat foundation that it doesn’t fall through.

In my case, I am building a turn based combat game similar to the second game I made using the Monkey-X programming language. The right way to do it (the way I started over doing it) is to first make a map and put a unit on it that can move, then can attack another unit in some way.

Moral of the Story

Build the simplest working version of the game first.

Don’t start putting your games’ furniture in until you have the foundation and probably walls of the game built.

Keep making awesome games.