Day 20 - Palm Tree, Rocks and Project Management

Art Update

I am kind of getting used to the style.

Palm tree was hard to do with extruding the flattened cubes. Each “leaf” is also slightly offset so it doesn’t look like a perfect circle. Trunk is 2 cubes repeated on top with Array modifier.

Rocks are just extruded cubes.

Project Management Update

I’ve joined an online conference hosted by Chris Zukowski (from howtomarketagame). If you don’t know the website and planning to go indie by releasing games on Steam, you should at least read the free articles.

The last talk was from Jake Birkett (he had a famous talk at GDC titled “How to Survive in Gamedev for Eleven Years Without a Hit”). He shared all about his games and data he collected over the years, and how much he made from them in hourly rates. He also talked about importance of tracking these if you’re going indie, since it’ll need to be a “profitable business” if you want to do it for a living. He does enjoy developing the games he do. It’s just logical way of thinking he acquired over the years of experience.

So, after some research I’ve found the tool I’m looking for.

My requirements were:

• Free

• Have prios

• Calendar view

• Timeline

• Time tracking

• Time estimation

• Total time spent per task

• Milestones

• Kanban style view

• Gantt chart

And it turns out ClickUp has all and more of the listed by free.

I also figured out I am much more motivated to “complete” tasks on a to-do style list.

If you don’t track your indie dev time, maybe give it a shot. You can also see how good/bad you’re doing, and I’ve been told that “you should have a deadline” (also from the conference)

Have a happy Saturday!