How Game Development taught me how to manage a project

Andreas Szekely — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 21:47:08 +0000

Game Development is an art.

It combines so many disciplines, and it is really tricky to manage it.
Programming is the core. But a game is nothing without a story or objective. And without some kind of graphics. And music. Plus how are you gonna do it without animations?

Yeah.

As a programmer, making stuff work was easy. I used Unity Engine which works with the C# language.

Easy stuff. Pretty cool too, as you really feel as a wizard. You want to make that cube move with a press of a button? Done. Want that tree to become red? Done.

Of course, I had to read pages of documentation and learn how stuff works, but I alread had my feet in the water.

The rest? Not so much easy.

I wanted to learn everything I needed, and tried to schedule it, so I could have a taste of how indie dev looks like from the perspective of a single dev.

The most difficult part was not learning other things. Was to manage them.

I learned a bit of Blender for 3D modelling. Watched videos and read a lot of tutorials. I could not do something big, but low poly was okay, so i kept that.

I was a little bit late with the models as I already programmed a few features and I needed the models to test them.

I was 2 days late with the models.

When I tried models and scripts, everything worked.

So, the gameplay works. Time to give the user an UI.

Giving the user an intuitive UI, in style with the rest of the game and nice to see, was not as hard as I thought, even though I watched a LOT of UI examples, with Do's and Don'ts.

Making them was gonna be easy. Deciding where to position them was more tricky.

While I was designing and thinking how the UI should be, a friend of mine tested the game and found a few bugs.

You have to manage a project based on priorities.

I had to choose between working on the UI or fixing bugs.

Make the Menu more easy and beautiful, or fix bugs?

Bug-Fix won. I, as user, hate bugs so I gave the priority to that.

I was late on the schedule by fixing bugs.

I allocated a few days for bug fixing. But this took a lot longer.

Finally I manged to fix everything and finish the UI.

The game was complete. Not perfect. Three days late than I expected. But worked.

I finished it. The game ran nice, wasn't so disastrous to look at, and more importantly, I made it.

I had to learn a lot of stuff. I had to juggle between things to keep with the schedule ( even though I missed it by a little ). But I learned a lot.

The first thing was that if I had learned the stuff I needed BEFORE starting, maybe I could have avoided to be late.

The second thing, is that Game Dev is hard. A lot of stuff to manage especially with deadlines. And you have to do it good, or else nobody will play your game!

The third thing, is that was fun. It was fun learning all those disciplines. 3D modelling, UI and 2D designing, a lot of cool stuff that I would never touch if it wasn't for this.

This has helped me learn about gamedev, how important scheduling is, and most of all, how important is to know a bit of everything you're gonna need so you can anticipate avoidable problems.

DEV Community: Andreas Szekely