After a couple of months with so inspiration or motivation to carry on, I have decided to create a plan and a schedule to help me with a more steady development process.

So, I have made a Google Sheet with a list of tasks that need to be acomplished and a rough schedule on when they need to be completed.

Backlog

First up is the backlog of all the tasks for the game, even the ones I have so far completed. I ended up with a list of 121 tasks or varying size and complexity, some of which are already complete.

I added in a category, sub-category and comment to each task to describe what needed to be done.

I then also added a size for the task, I used t-shirt sizing for each task, where each size relates to a number of hours (this can be seen in the Hours column which is automatically populated based on the Size).

XS = 1 hour or under
S = 2 hours
M = 4 hours (half a day)
L = 8 hours (1 day)
XL = 16+ hours (2+ days)

Finally I setup a priority for each task (1-10, where 1 is urgent) and based on that separated the tasks into milestones of: Prototype, First-Playable, Alpha, Beta, Gold.

Prototype: I know what the game is and know it is fun.
First-Playable: Core loop is playable with some key in-game mechanics.
Alpha: Added more features to the core loop. Some meta and monetisation features.
Beta: Soft launch features are complete. With full end-to-end playthrough possible.
Gold: Improvements and secondary features.

These milestones are just to breakup the tasks into chunks so I can see the game progressing. This will hopefully also help my burnout as tasks for one feature will be spread across the milestones based on their importance, therefore split into managable chunks.

You can see here the split between tasks that have been completed, and those that still need to be… I obviously still have a ways to go…

Schedule

My next task was setting up a rough schedule that I could stick to in between my placement year, then my final year or university as well as other personal commitments. I calculated that I could achieve roughly 7.5 of work a week (mainly on the weekends) and I used that as the basis for my schedule.

With my backlog I knew roughly the total amount of hours I needed to work and rouhgly how long each task would be and so fitting them into a schedule was quite easy. I had to be careful about tasks depending on eachother (and making sure they were in the right order), but otherwise setting up a weekly schedule of tasks was quite simple.

Below you can see the first part of the schedule for the months of May and June:

So my first tasks that are due next week relate to getting resources up and running.