What's the Deal with Development Timelines?

So now I want to do something a little different and talk about development timelines. And to do that, I’m going to need to give a little background. I started my full-time indie journey in January 2023, with a plan of pumping out one small game prototype every month for the full year, and then deciding at the end of the year if I wanted to revisit and expand on any of them.

I met my goal that January, finishing a prototype for Planetoid Game, a simple platform fighting game set on a series of tiny planets with their own gravitational pull (think like a 2D Mario Galaxy). That was a great case of making a fun, simple idea that had some room to be expanded upon, but didn’t necessarily need it. I like that game. It was fun to work on, and always a blast to playtest with groups of friends. I might revisit it after I finish this project just to fix some bugs.

The next game I worked on was The Stuff Gun, a silly arcade top-down shooter where you can pick up any object and shoot it out of your gun. And I finished that one in mid-May. Now, I did take a couple weeks break between Planetoid Game and The Stuff Gun, to update my shared code packages and just to relax. I have been maintaining some shared code packages to reuse across projects, and gradually updating and improving them as I make more games that demand better capabilities. So I didn’t actually take three and a half months to make The Stuff Gun; I only took three months. Which was still three times longer than I had planned to work on it.

There were several reasons for that. One was larger scope. I made a jump from 2D to 3D. I went from one game mode to two (co-op horde mode and versus mode). There were dozens of item types in The Stuff Gun. The closest analogue in Planetoid Game were power ups, of which there were only seven. I also started a part-time gig walking dogs, and took several days to tour apartments during that time. So I was not as focused with my time.

But I still think I did a good job of scope control. It was a fun, simple idea that had room to be expanded upon, but didn’t necessarily need it. I did release the game with only two levels, one of which was a playable credits sequence, and only a couple dozen items, a little under half as many as I had initially brainstormed. There were only five enemy varieties, and honestly it could have used a couple more. That’s probably the biggest flaw in the game. But I had decided on my scope already, with the understanding that it was just a prototype and I could revisit it to add more later if I wanted to. My main issue was just that I needed to adjust my timelines for the fact that I had started dog walking and was no longer as singularly focused on game development.

So I took a month and a half break between that and my next game, to update my code packages, relax, and move house. I did some work during that time on a smaller, weirder game with a friend called Unusual Wind. But finally at the start of July 2023, I started on a game with the working title “Doomvania”. That was the game that would become Archetype and the Four Winds of Hell.

I planned on a linear increase in project duration. The first one was one month. The second was three months. I planned for the third to be five months. But there was one other way that this was to be my biggest scope yet. In Planetoid Game and The Stuff Gun, all of the sound effects and music were creative commons, just pulled off of opengameart.org. The characters in Planetoid Game were literal stick figures with intentionally shitty animations. The character animations in The Stuff Gun were from Mixamo, and the enemies were a cheap asset pack. But for my Doomvania, I wanted to work with a composer, a sound designer, and an animator to make all custom assets for the game. And here’s a message I sent on a Discord server on July 19, 2023, early on in the project:

“I'm looking for an animator, a composer, and a sound designer to work with me on my small hobby project. It is a small-scale metroidvania loosely inspired by Avatar: the Last Airbender. I am planning on low-fi 3D models for the character and enemies, but am open if a sprite animator is interested. Planned scope:

• Four (very) small areas, one for each Avatar element. Hopefully a unique soundtrack for each zone, with an additive layer for combat music.
• Eight basic enemy types, which may be cut down further.
• One mini-boss enemy type

I've already done some dev work on character movement and powerups, and will continue to do dev and sprite work. I am planning to finish this project before Thanksgiving this year, and will cut scope if (when) necessary. The main goal of this project is a portfolio piece for everyone involved. DM me if you're interested.”

Yup, before Thanksgiving. That was last year. So what happened? Several factors. One is that I wanted to make the game actually good. One is that I did not get any responses to that message. One is that I greatly underestimated some tasks. And would you believe me if I told you that other things came up in my life? Such is the way when you’re not working full time in an office for someone else.

A week after that Discord message, I pushed a commit to my git repo with the message: “Start blocking out water zone.” July 25, 2023. That was when I started the level design process. Read all about it in my previous devlog. On August 12, I pushed a commit with the message “Address some of the player feedback.” So it was in that time between July 25 and August 12 that I started getting other people to playtest my game.

If you want to make a good game, you need to get people to playtest it. If you want to make a game quickly, you can’t do that. Making a game good requires a lot of testing and iteration. It can’t just come out fully formed and successful on the first iteration like enterprise software (enterprise software actually comes out incredibly flawed, they just rarely iterate on it afterward to improve any of those flaws). So I kind of doomed my timeline the moment I started playtesting and making substantial changes based on those results.

The next commit message is “Remove weapon selection wheel; assign a different button for each power instead”. Yeah, the game used to have a weapon selection wheel. Playtesting showed me that that was a bad idea. A couple commits later is “Pretty good progress on the grappling hook rework.” So I also completely reworked how the grappling hook functioned based on platelets. Nobody liked it. So I reworked it, multiple times. Read about that whole process in one of my earlier devlogs.

And so, through August and September of 2024, progress was going well, despite a lot of time and effort being spent iterating and improving things rather than building the rest of the game. That went on until early October. Then everything was uprooted.

Sometimes Political Action Takes Precedence Over Game Development

In the summer of 2020, when the nation was in an uprising over the murder of George Floyd and many others, things hit a boiling point in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. No amount of teargas and pepper spray in a dense residential neighborhood was enough. The protestors kept shouting mean words toward the cops and throwing the occasional empty water bottle. So the cowards in the Seattle police department committed a dereliction of duty and fled the East Precinct. The city abandoned all basic services in the area, including garbage collection. Protestors took the opportunity to set up an occupied protest zone in and around Cal Anderson Park, a large park in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, and attempt to fulfill people’s needs where the government refused to. That became known as the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest, or CHOP. Motivated by several factors, such as the desire to highlight food insecurity and how it disproportionately impacts people of color, the desire to build a living memorial to Black and Indigenous people killed by police, and a desire for working class people to be able to connect with land and learn about traditional medicinal and ceremonial herbs, some of the protestors planted a garden in the park. That became known as the Black Lives Memorial Garden.

Cal Anderson Park, by the way, is named after the first openly gay member of the Washington state legislature, who famously said that if a park were ever named after him, he wanted it to be a safe place for the homeless to set up camp. And during that occupied protest, homeless people from all over the greater Seattle area moved into the zone. They recognized that, in their life situation, they were safer where there were no police.

After about a month, the police came back, forced everyone out, threw away many homeless people’s tents and all of their belongings that they were not wearing, and returned most things to business as usual. The Black Lives Memorial Garden was one of the few things that remained. And it lasted and thrived for three years.

On October 7, 2023, we got an email that the city planned to destroy it and replant grass there. The phrasing that the city used was that they wanted us to “move” the garden. They offered to help us move it. Now, in case you’re not familiar with the concept of a garden, it’s not really something you can just move. Plants are immobile life forms. They have roots. Most of them don’t survive being uprooted as adults. The closest thing you can do to moving a garden is destroying the original garden, and planting a whole new garden in a different location, using the few survivors from the original garden, and a lot of new plants.

Now, why did the city want to destroy this garden? In their words, “The sun bowl is not an appropriate place for the Black Lives Memorial Garden. It is designed as a natural amphitheater, and is meant to host events such as movies and concerts.” At the time the garden was planted, there had been no events there for over a year. That was even before the start of the covid pandemic. And there had been no city-sanctioned events there in the three years since. Of course, our community had several non-city-sanctioned movie nights, concerts, classes, workshops, and fairs in that area. But now, after three years, the city suddenly wanted to start hosting events there again. And you clearly can’t show movies in the park if there’s a garden in the general area. It’s worth noting, also, that the city had successfully screened Rocky Horror Picture Show the previous two years elsewhere in the park. So their official explanation seems pretty flimsy.

The real reasons came down to control and embarrassment. They didn’t like that the garden was not under their control. They didn’t choose what plants were planted there or who was allowed to work in it. They didn’t like that community members directly planted the garden themselves instead of going through a bureaucratic process to ask the city to pretty please plant a garden.  The garden was an embarrassment to them, because it was a reminder of how they terrorized and then abandoned the neighborhood in 2020. They were embarrassed by it because community members used it as a hub for mutual aid activities, providing resources and services that the city failed to provide to the most vulnerable. Because of its use as a mutual aid hub, homeless people tended to gather there, making the city’s failure on that front more visible.

Now, why did we want the garden to stay? Because it still served its original purpose. It still highlighted food insecurity and how it disproportionately impacts people of color. It was still a living memorial to Black and Indigenous people killed by police (another embarrassment to the city). It was still a way for working class people to connect with the land and learn about traditional medicinal and ceremonial herbs. It still produced food, which was given away for free to the community. I live in a studio apartment with no patio a few blocks from the park. It was by far the easiest way for me to have the satisfaction of doing garden work.

So we decided that the garden wasn’t going down without a fight. And because of that, I worked very little on this game for the next three months. At first, there was a lot of energy around maintaining a constant occupation of the garden. On Friday, Oct. 13, the day the city said they wanted the garden gone, we had an all day party with community potlucks for every meal. I was there all day. It was a wonderful time.

And our group maintained a constant occupation for the next few months. It was easy for the first couple of weeks. People who had flexible work schedules, myself included, used that to their full advantage. People who worked full time used up their sick days. Someone would bring dinner to share nearly every day. I brought some kickass squash and sweet potato curry one day and a big pot of chili another day. They were both big hits. On Tuesday, Oct. 17, a work crew came to set up a temporary work zone fence around the garden. I’m not sure what happened to it, but it did not remain there for long.

On Monday, Oct. 23, one woman in the community brought a camping griddle in the morning and made pancakes for everyone. That was the start of a tradition that has continued to this day: free pancake breakfast in the park every Monday morning. 

This is how the anarchists are bullying the neighborhood. With free pancakes.

On Tuesday, Oct. 24, a work crew showed up with an excavator and an escort of about 5 cops. Between 40 and 50 of us sat in the garden and refused to move aside for their machinery. After about a 20 minute standoff, they turned the excavator around and drove it back up onto the trailer that had brought it there.

And then the city changed tactics. Homeless people had always been a substantial part of this movement. They didn’t just move to the CHOP zone in 2020 for their safety; they moved in to be a part of the movement. And in 2023, when the garden was under threat, many homeless people set up camp around the garden to maintain the occupation and be the first responders whenever the city showed up to try to destroy the garden. So the city stopped targeting the garden itself, and began daily sweeps of the homeless people living around the garden.

Sweeping is a profoundly violent act that city governments do to attempt to brush away the visible signs of homelessness without actually solving any of the causes, or actually getting anyone into housing or even shelter. Cops and sanitation workers show up and demand that homeless people pack up all of their belongings and move. If they don’t pack up fast enough, the sanitation workers will throw away their belongings. Social workers are supposed to be there to offer resources and shelter referrals too, but they often don’t show up until the homeless people have already had to leave. Even when the social workers do show up on time, they rarely actually have any shelter available, and even when they do, there are usually logistical reasons that people can’t go there. And when I showed up to support those living around the garden as they were swept, I heard one refrain from many people:

“Thank you for being here. They’re a lot nicer to us when housed people are here.”

It hurt to hear that, knowing that I couldn’t always be there. Showing up for sweep support dominated my life for a couple weeks. I planned on being there in the garden every Monday and Thursday. Mondays to cook pancakes for everyone, and Thursdays for meetings with the food and stewardship committees. We had self-organized into several committees looking after the many different needs of the garden occupation. There was:

• The stewardship committee, focused on maintenance of the garden and directing other people who wanted to do garden work.
• The food committee, focused on providing as many free meals at the garden site for the people occupying it.
• The heating and shelter committee, focused on maintaining heat sources and shelters from the rain, because it was winter in Seattle.
• The health and sanitation committee, focused on cleaning the park bathrooms, keeping the area clean of trash, and keeping the area stocked with harm reduction supplies.
• The outreach committee, focused on PR, social media, flyering, etc. to raise awareness of what the city was planning with people who were less plugged in.
• The night watch committee, who kept watch at night in case of city officials or other saboteurs showing up overnight or early in the morning.

Unfortunately, I did not hold a firm boundary to only show up on Mondays and Thursdays. The city sweep team came most often on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and when an alert went out in our chats that sweep support was needed, I had to go. So I ended up spending nearly every morning in the garden, and my afternoons were often filled with dog walks. I would regularly go a full week only working on the game one day. On some peaceful Mondays and Thursdays, I brought my laptop to the garden and worked on the game there under the canopy, pouring rain mere feet away from it.

Eventually, as a group, we had to come to terms with the fact that what we were doing was unsustainable. The city could keep coming and tearing apart what little lives the homeless people living in the park had, and we could keep wearing ourselves out showing up to support every day. We could keep staying after the sweep to set up a tarp for shelter from the rain, and keep hoping one of us could convince a worker to allow us to have it back the next time they were there for a sweep. But sometimes they wouldn’t let us keep our tarp, sometimes we would have to replace it, and eventually we were all going to be too tired, or everybody would run out of sick days, to keep up the fight. The city workers would get tired too, and I’m sure some of them would have a crisis of conscience, but they would keep coming, because money is a powerful motivator.  We organized a weekly schedule, and accepted that we had to be okay with fewer people being there each day. And we had to hold our personal boundaries, only come on the days we were scheduled, and trust that other people had it on the days we weren’t. With that, I finally did start practicing that vital skill of holding boundaries and not overcommitting. I started only coming on Mondays and Thursdays, and painfully ignoring the alerts in our message thread when the sweep team showed up to tear apart people’s lives, just to continue working on this game.

But this whole struggle had already pushed me past my original planned deadline of Thanksgiving. It wasn’t until December that we actually developed this weekly schedule plan. We had already delayed the destruction of the garden by a month and a half.

The struggle would continue for the rest of that month, as well. I finally started getting work done on the game again on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I continued cooking pancakes in the garden for dozens of people on Monday mornings, and going to meetings in the garden on Thursdays. I continued supporting the people being swept most Thursdays.

At the beginning of December, they welded the park bathrooms shut. That doesn’t just hurt people doing an occupation protest. It doesn’t just hurt homeless people living in and around the park. It hurts everyone. At least according to that bestselling book, Everybody Poops.  The city government was perfectly happy to destroy a public good for everyone, just to make things a little bit less convenient for a protest group. Now, the city hadn’t been keeping up with cleaning those bathrooms, and they were always a mess. Our comrades in the health and sanitation committee had been doing the city’s job for them there lately. Again, the city was acting out of embarrassment rather than trying to provide for any public good. I am proud to say that I stood by the door too close for them to weld it safely until they had porta potties brought in to take their place. So harm reduced.

One day, the police with the sweep team came in with a particular venom, shouting at us to immediately leave the area. Bear in mind, this is a public park, where anyone is allowed to be anywhere. Under the city’s laws, police or other city employees can set up a temporary work perimeter where people are temporarily not allowed. They had set up no such perimeter. They were just shouting at everyone to leave some undefined area. So several of us asked them to define the area. How far did we need to move?

This is a good tactic known as malicious compliance. If a cop tells you to jump, don’t just jump. Ask how high. Make them define it precisely. Then jump absolutely no higher. And be as big a pain in their ass about it as possible. The more time and effort they have to expend getting you to do what they want, the less time they have to harass homeless people or kill Black people.

So sweep workers got the idea and set up their yellow tape delineating the area we needed to leave. Now that that was set up, under the city’s laws, the people being removed must be given a chance to remove their belongings from the area. Think of the alternative. Cops could just arbitrarily draw a circle around you and your belongings and then take them, even though you and your belongings had been there legally a moment before. However, the police and the sweep team were not following any laws that day. They did not allow us to move anything out. They forced us out of the perimeter, with no chance to remove our belongings from the perimeter. Even lawful sweeps are cruel, but this wasn’t a lawful sweep; it was outright theft. They stole the tarp giving people shelter from the rain, the fire pit giving people a bit of warmth, the firewood to fuel that fire pit, people’s blankets, and everything else they could get their greasy fingers on.

They would make their arguments about how you’re not allowed to store your personal property in the park.

“What about my backpack?” I asked them. “I set my backpack down on the ground in the park. Am I not allowed to do that?”

“That’s okay, because you’re here with it.”

But the owners of the tarp and the fire pit and other survival infrastructure were also there with it. None of it was abandoned. It’s just a double standard where housed people are allowed to use parks in ways that homeless people are not.

By the way, contained fires, such as our fire pit, are legal in paved areas of Seattle parks (we did have it in a paved area). We were in compliance with the laws. The cops just weren’t actually there for laws. They were there to take away necessities from the people already living in the most desperate circumstances.

One disabled woman was not able to leave the perimeter they had set up quickly enough, and they shoved her back, knowing full well that there was a tripping hazard immediately behind her. When one other comrade rushed in to catch her and help her regain balance, the cops tackled both people and restrained them face down. There were now around 20 cameras recording the assault they had just committed. But cops do have a way out of that. The assault becomes okay (legally) if they arrest their victims. And they can arrest people without even making any charges, as long as they release the victim within 48 hours. So that’s what they did. They arrested two people, one disabled woman for not being able to leave the circle they had drawn around her quickly enough, and one man for re-entering that circle to help her regain her balance. They pulled down the man’s pants and exposed him to the world in the process. They didn’t make any charges, because they realized no jury would convict the two of them. The man was released later that day, and the woman the next day.

But they did steal the tarp, the fire pit, and many other personal belongings, and the sweep crew took advantage of the distraction to even steal things from outside the perimeter. When I saw one of them grabbing a wood pallet outside the perimeter, I grabbed the other side of it and pulled back, yelling “back off, scumbag.” I was pretty pissed at that point, and not prioritizing optimally. Wood pallets are useful for people living in tents to elevate their tents off the ground and keep them out of pooling water on the ground. Remember, this is Seattle in the winter. It rains nearly every day. Still, there were probably better priorities to save than a wood pallet. It did feel good to call a sweep worker a scumbag though. And he did let go of it,for what it’s worth.

Anyway, the city completely dropped their mask of benevolence that day, and it was terrible for their image. They backed off for a while. And things remained calm until Christmas. I got some work done on the game, then took the week off for my mom to visit. Christmas day was a Monday, so my mom joined us to make pancakes for everyone in the park. Honestly the most wholesome Christmas I’ve ever had. We made ACAB (Almonds, Cranberries, And Blueberries) pancakes. We got my mom to call out “ACAB” when one was ready.

Then, just before 5am on Wednesday, December 27, a horde of about 40 cops arrived, taking advantage of so many people being out of town for the holidays. They arrested a few homeless people, and intimidated the rest of them into leaving. They put up a chain link fence around the entire section of the park, chained to nearby trees for support. They brought multiple excavators and tractors in to tear out the perennials of the garden and scatter grass seed. Given that it was the middle of winter, the grass did not germinate. They kept that fence up for over three months afterward. They paid a private security firm to maintain a 24/7 presence inside the fence for the first month or so of that. The security firm they hired was called Evergreen Off Duty. All of their security guards are off-duty cops, so this was an intentional handout from the city to our uniformed pigs.

Public records requests afterward showed that the city spent $89,000 destroying the garden. That figure does not even account for the near daily sweeps for over a month, or the constant private security presence for the month after. All in all, it was an incredible waste of taxpayer money.

And an incredible waste of our effort as well. Not just our effort over those two and a half months to defend the garden from destruction, but our effort over the previous three years tending it. And for what? They used that area of the park for four movie nights this past summer. They destroyed a community resource that people were gathering in and benefitting from at least once a week, year round, so that they could do something else with that space four nights a year. And they could have easily just had their movie nights on the other end of the park, as they have done. But it was never about how they wanted to use the space; it was about getting rid of something that was embarrassing to them.

Back to Game Development

Anyway, the point is, that whole thing came up and dashed my remaining hopes of finishing by the end of the year, as I had originally planned. I set my new goal as working on it for no more than one year, which put my deadline in early July.

Now, I lost two months to garden defense, and I gave myself an extra six months in response. Why did I do that?

It was partly an adjustment for the amount of time I actually had available for game development. Since I started the project, my time walking dogs and pet sitting had increased significantly. It went from about an hour once or twice a week, to two or three hours four days a week.

And it was partly an adjustment for my change in priority from finishing something quickly, to making a good, polished game. If you want to make a game quickly, don’t playtest. Just throw it all together and see how it lands right at the end. You won’t need to make any major design changes or rework any systems. You’ll just be able to finish a game quickly, and it probably won’t be fun at the end. But if you want to make a game good, you have to playtest regularly. The playtests will show you that you need to make design changes, and rework systems. And the game will be far better for it. But it takes a lot longer.

My next big mistake was dragging my feet with finding collaborators for the project. I had made the decision to buy an asset pack for enemies, and to animate the player character myself. So I no longer needed an animator, but I still needed a composer and a sound designer. And, I decided, a pixel artist to help with background art. Because I wanted it to look good, and I wanted to spend the remainder of the project focused on things like finishing the mechanics implementation, bug fixing, and level design.

And, learning from my last message that didn’t get any responses, I posted in the “paid job opportunities” channel instead of the “volunteer trade” channel. That got me some responses. Having a video of alpha gameplay footage also helped. But that post wasn’t until April 4, 2024. 

That gave a maximum of three months for contractors to finish all of the work for the game. And contractors are generally not solely focused on your project. If they are, then you’re probably a big tech company just classifying some full-time employees as contractors so you don’t have to provide health insurance. So three months was already not enough, and it came out closer to two months by the time I waited for people to reach out, evaluated my options, and worked out contracts with the people I wanted to work with.

But anyway, in May, I was working toward a finished game, I had hired Miles Allen for music and sound design, and he was working away at that. I had hired Amantino for background art and he was working away at that. The project was going well. I continued to playtest every week at the Saturday coworking sessions I go to with Seattle Indies, and it got to the point where watching other people play my game was no longer painful. People actually understood the game, and had fun with it. It was great.

In early June, I applied to show the game in Seattle Indies Expo, using this WIP trailer. If you watch it, you’ll notice that it’s still missing most of the background art. You’ll also notice in that trailer that I said it was coming in August. That was me adjusting the timeline based on the realization that July did not give Miles or Amantino enough time to finish their work. I didn’t get into the expo, mainly because it was visually obvious that the game was incomplete (missing background art and sound effects). Games generally don’t show well at conventions when they’re like that.

In early July, I got to a point where, other than the remaining sound effects, music tracks, and background art, the game could have been called complete. There were still some rough edges, sure, but more the kind of rough edges that give a game character, not the ones that make it seriously hard to enjoy. But the problem was, Miles and Amantino hadn’t had nearly enough time to do their work. I had just waited until way too late in the process before hiring them.

The next consideration was Steam Next Fest. Next Fest is three times a year, and it’s one of the best bang for your buck marketing opportunities for indie developers. The general advice is to participate in the last Next Fest before release. The rules are that you can only participate in one, and you can only participate before your game releases. As of the Next Fest in June, I was still missing most of the background art and sound effects, so I didn’t join that one. The next would be in October, so I had to push my release back later than that. I chose the end of November just to be on the safe side. I had underestimated timelines three times at that point, so I decided to overestimate this time, and give myself a full month that I didn’t think I needed. I got the last of the background and steam page art from Amantino in late September, and the last of the music from Miles in early October. With that, I was able to make a final trailer and a complete-looking demo, and complete and publish my steam page just on time for the October Next Fest. I plan on doing one more retrospective dev log after the game releases, so I’ll talk more about Next Fest in that. And you’ll notice in that trailer that I committed to a precise release date: 11/29/24. The last Friday this November. And now, I can say with confidence, that is actually when the game will be released. No more delays. Because the game is done and uploaded to Steam, and Valve has approved it. I gave myself 3 weeks longer than I needed, which is way better than if I had given myself 3 weeks less than I needed.

And because I had extra time while waiting for assets, I did a lot of stretch tasks that I otherwise would not have done. So I think the game is still better for the extra time I spent on it, just maybe not in a way that was worth it.

A Rambly Conclusion

It’s common wisdom that you will use as much time as you give yourself. You can always find more to improve in a work. At some point you just have to call it good enough and release it. And there are still ways I could improve Archetype. I just feel strongly that it is good enough at this point, and I would like to move on to the next project. You’ll notice that my target date slipped back several times after the initial delay. First, I planned to release in July, then August, then I finally committed to November. That is in part because I waited too long to hire Miles and Amantino, but also in part because I did not hold them to any timeline. I was that overly chill boss who just said, “yeah, whenever it’s done.” Similarly to how you will use as much time as you give yourself, contractors, too, will use as much time as you give them. That was my failure not giving them a clear and reasonable timeline.

I have trouble with imposing timelines on other people. For one thing, I think deadlines in general are arbitrary. I used to work in tech, and we always had arbitrary deadlines imposed on us from the top down. It was rarely a reasonable amount of time to accomplish what they wanted from us. And the thing that made that hard to take is that there would be no real-world consequences if the product took longer than that to complete. The only non-arbitrary deadlines in the world is the deadline to cut our carbon emissions at least in half by 2030, and to cut them to near zero by 2040. And it seems like those are the only deadlines that virtually no companies are taking seriously. There are plenty of medical products that, the sooner they are complete, the better, but there is no fixed time by which they have to be complete. It’s pretty hard to say my frivolous little video game about killing demons with the Avatar reincarnation cycle is of any real importance, or that there are any consequences to it not coming out by a specific time. The only consequence of this project taking longer is that I can’t move on to the next one as soon.

All that said, though, it does help a project to have an agreed-upon prediction of when it will be complete. I am consciously advocating for an agreed-upon prediction rather than an imposed-upon deadline. I’m also not advocating for point estimates of individual tasks using only Fibonacci numbers. That’s fucking stupid. Individual tasks don’t need to be estimated. Just the number of tasks is enough to estimate the overall project. For any project, you will be keeping track of the tasks necessary to complete a game. You will mark off tasks as you complete them, and you will also add tasks throughout the project as you realize other things are necessary. After working for a little while, you will be able to develop a best-fit line for complete tasks over time, and a best-fit line for total tasks over time. Where the two lines meet is when you can predict the project will be complete. If the two lines are growing farther apart over time rather than closer together, you have a serious problem. I started this project with 55 tasks in my list, and completed it with 436. I unfortunately did not track addition and completion dates of tasks in my list, so I do not have data on the number of total tasks and complete tasks over time. I will definitely do that on my next project. With that as a guide to predict when the game should be complete, I could have better coordinated with my collaborators and agreed to a more precise timeline.

So now, I’ll try to reduce this whole thing to a bullet-point list of learnings:

• If you’re going to work with collaborators, get them on the project early. It’s better for everyone. They have more time to do their part. You can have a game look and sound complete earlier, which allows you to have a good-looking Steam page that you can publish earlier, and you can make a more complete-looking demo to show at conventions and expos.
• Keep track of total and complete tasks over time, and use that data to inform a prediction of when you think the game will be complete.
• Clearly communicate your timeline predictions with your collaborators. If your prediction does not give someone else enough time, you will need to adjust your timeline. All the more reason to get them on the project early.
• Fuck the police.
• Hold firm boundaries and don’t allow things to dominate all of your time if you don’t really want them to. You have to trust other people involved in your struggle. Don’t be like Mordin Solus. It doesn’t always have to be you.
• Take marketing opportunities like Next Fest and other festivals into consideration when deciding your target release date. And make sure you’re ready by the time they come around. I’ll say one more time: all the more reason to get collaborators on the project early.
• Don’t work for long without a target date. You will take as much time as you give yourself. There will be times when you think of another task that would improve the game, but probably isn’t necessary. Your target date will inform whether you add that task to the list.
• Wishlist my game on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3020370. If you want to buy it here on itch.io instead, mark your calendar I guess. November 29, 2024.