Slow and steady wins the race

NPittak on #1GAM

In comes One Game A Month! One Game a Month is a website that is run by fellow game developer Christer "McFunkypants" Kaitila, (twitter) who has created over 40 games and written a couple books to boot.  This amazing brooding ground of creativity runs a month long game jam that happens every month of the year! 12 game jams a year, 365 days of game developing bliss! I mean this site is so devoted to game development and fostering the creative freedom that game creation allows that Christer even turned the act of participating in a game jam into a game! The website awards you for participating in their monthly jams by granting you an achievement that is displayed on your developers profile on the site. My profile actually says I am currently a level 4 game developer, I intend on getting this as high as possible over the time frame of the foreseeable future.

One Game a Month was originally introduced to me a couple years back and although I have not submitted a game yet, I have participated in monthly jams offline by coming up with new ideas for the current months theme.  When looking into ways that I can keep my motivation up while working towards becoming a professional developer whilst also working full time as a Security Analyst I rediscovered this gem. I also found that blogging about what is on my mind and holding myself to a schedule will help strengthen not only my writing skills but also keep me thinking critically about game design and theory (even is that schedule is once every other month).

If there is one thing that I could change about my current situation it would be to have more time.  More time to learn, more time to chase down my dream, more time to do things that I think are interesting and more time to devote to my wife and our relationship.  But the truth of the matter is that time is a finite resource and we as intellectuals need to learn to use that resource as efficiently as possible. This is where agile management methodologies come into play.  In my personal life I have never been one to make or keep to a schedule. I have always been the kind of guy to just go with the flow. But when the flow pulls you farther and farther away from your passion or goal in life something has to give.  I started planning out time throughout the week where I can sit down and work on my skills as a designer as well as actually using tools like Kanban to track my projects.

hacknplan Project Management Tool

I found this awesome tool called Hack n' Plan (hacknplan.com). This tool has really streamlined my game projects and made organization of my ideas much more manageable. This tool incorporates some key Agile methodologies and allows for very quick idea iteration while keeping track of your work backlog for you.  It also keeps all your design documents in one spot! I would totally recommend this to anyone interested in a project management tool or just wants to organize their projects a little better.

When it comes to keeping track of my day to day activities I took the advice of a coworker and grabbed a TUL Custom Note-Taking System. This binder paired with the Passion Planner printable pages have been a god send! The pages are very detailed a modular to accommodate any work style.  If you are struggling with time management at all, I would highly recommend looking into some sort of tracking method.  It does not have to be what I suggested but I cannot express enough how helpful it has been making time to stay organized.

I would be remiss if I did not say that its hard to change old habits.  It has been hard to be more organized but you cannot argue with how much less stressful it is when you have something written down saying you should be doing something at a given time instead of just going with the flow.  Don't get me wrong, there is something to be said about being flexible and agile but there is defiantly a need for a good framework for that flexibility! I am doing my best to become a better version of myself every single day, on step at a time.  Like the old saying goes, slow and steady wins the race!

Game jams are amazing learning tools.  They afford you the creative freedom to try new things, take chances on experimental design and make risky mechanical choices in order to see what works and what doesn't. They are also extremely social opportunities for like minded individuals to get together and do something creative while learning from one another. Only problem is that game jams do not happen constantly, or at least not with the social aspect that also comes along with them, or so I thought.