Month #2 in the “One Game A Month“-Challenge. For this month I started working on a turn based tower defense game, just seeing how combining this two ‘genres’ would work out. It got to the playable prototype stage, but it’s far from a Minimum Viable Product.

What went Well:

• Tracking Tasks Online: We started to use Trello to track tasks, and I think it is a massive improvement over text files with tasks synced over Dropbox. For a small team it has enough features but is still simple enough to not be a hassle to use. We will see how this will work out in the months to come.

What went Wrong:

• Scope Small: It’s like a running gag, but it seems like software developers just really like to either underestimate effort, or overestimate their capabilities… Either way, the scope was again too large for one month, I have to learn to really change my mindset, lower my expectations and think smaller. I could have probably cut a lot more features to make the scope more manageable.
• Learning New Tools Can be Taunting: I intended to learn to use Overlap2D, a visual ui/level/content editor, for creating the UI and importing it to libGDX. I had to jump through some hoops to get it to start on Linux, then toyed around with it a bit, and also read some documentation, but didn’t really know where to start, so I postponed it for later, but never got to it again.
  I’m still interested in using Overlap2D to make creating UI easier, but I really gotta plan in some dedicated days just for learning how to use and integrate it into my toolchain/workflow.
• Sleep Well: Previous week I never got more than 6 hours of sleep, causing me to be sleepy by the time I got back home from work in the evening. But I didn’t want to go to sleep because I didn’t to much Game Dev the last day, but I couldn’t work efficiently, because I was exhausted from sleeping so few hours, which caused me to waste hours I could have better spent sleeping, continuing the cycle the next day…
  Essentially a whole week was lost through this. Few hours of concentrated work are better than many hours of working while desperately trying not to fall asleep. So do yourself the favor and go to sleep!

News

In Other news, we finally set up our twitter account, now we just gotta use it. We will probably be tweeting about game-releases, blog posts and stuff under the handle @aawesomestudios. (Yes, that’s the maximum length for twitter names. Yes, any similar/shorter names have already been taken.)

We have been at the Game Dev Days Graz. It has been an awesome experience, talking to other game developers, playing their games and listening to all the talks. Maybe next year, we will be there showcasing our games. Who knows.

For the next month we are going to focus on polishing up some older games.