On Delays

Wow! It's been very (too) long since the last post. I must admit that I'm a bit ashamed. Not only did it take me too long to update the blog, but Chubby Buddy has also taken me longer than expected!

Precisely, the last-hour rush in the development of Chubby Buddy has been the primary cause for the hiatus of the blog. If in this previous entry I reflected on the importance of setting deadlines, in this entry I want to put the stress on the importance and difficulties in making an accurate scheduling.

A good strategy when you've gone off schedule is to analyze the reasons that led you astray. In my case, the reasons have been the following, listed from more to less relevance in my opinion:

1. Underestimated effort for universal app.
2. Few experience with the framework.
3. Underestimated effort for additional features support.
4. Not so much commitment during Christmas.
5. Few experience with the language.

We wanted to achieve an universal app that worked under different versions of iPhones and iPads, but this involved re-doing all the art in the game to adjust to different screen resolutions, and also make some adjustments at the code level to support these different versions. This entails a good amount of work and I definitely underestimated the required effort.

Even when Cocos2D is enjoyable and usable, it is a new framework that imposes certain rules and it is not always obvious how to accomplish some functionality. After a bunch of lines of code, I needed to check Stackoverflow or the Cocos2d forums to figure out how to achieve something new. 

In the last minute, Manuela and I thought about adding a couple of new features that supposedly wouldn't entail lots of effort; we were wrong. However, we think that the final result makes up for this extra-effort.

For several reasons, our dedication to the game during Christmas holidays was not as high as I had expected. Had we worked as initially planned, the game would have been released much earlier.

Finally, even when Objective-C is a really easy to grasp language, it presents a couple of differences with Java or C/C++, languages which I'm much more used to work with. 

It only remains to try the best in order to keep up the pace!

FM

Happy New Year 2PS4!

Hi all,

It's been a while since my last post due to the rush of work in December and to Christmas holidays. First of all, I want to wish you a happy new year 2014. I'm really thrilled to tell you that the Holy Kings, who come to Spain on the 6th of January every year, have brought me many surprises, specially in the field of gaming. I must have been a good guy after all, or at least, that is what they must have thought :)

Among many other stuff, I've been 'rewarded' with a splendid Playstation 4. Together with it, I've received three games: FIFA 2014, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Battlefield 4, of which I only could try the first two for the moment. My first impressions couldn't have been better, and I've only scratched the surface. The games look awesome, the controller (Dual Shock 3) has a better feeling and the system interface is intuitive and provides seamless social integration with Facebook and Twitter. The 'Share' button of the controller makes amazingly easy to share with your friends a screenshot or a video of the game you're playing. 

The differences between the FIFA 2014 versions are more than noticeable between PS3 and PS4, specially regarding the animations and physics of the players and the ball. This is due, to a great extent, to the Ignite engine that boosts the game for the new generation consoles. I cannot talk about the other games because I haven't tested them on PS3. 

It's also encouraging to read that Sony is being very thoughtful with regards to independent developers, many of whom have already expressed their satisfaction on developing for this platform. Hopefully I'll become one of these developers in the near future! 

I leave you with some pictures that I took during the unboxing and initial setup of the PS4. 

The Deadline-Driven Being

No, sorry, this is not the name of a horror game. This post intends to be a reflection about the nature of human beings. Actually, in the heading I'm using "Deadline-Driven" as a synonym of "Human". The goal of this post is to insist on the importance of setting hard deadlines for your projects. Don't underestimate this piece of advice, because psychology and project management theory have proven what I'm claiming here. 

Just remember when you were in school or in college. When were you more productive? When did you study the most? I'm sure that the answers to both questions are the same: the day before the exam. Yes, you had four months to prepare the exam. Of course you could have been studying all along the semester. Sure you could have prepared the exam two or three weeks before the day of the exam. But you didn't, I didn't and almost no one did it (of course there might be rare exceptions over there). 

It's sad but we can't fight our nature. As the name of an interesting film that I recently saw stated, we are what we are. And humans are deadline-driven. 

Figure 1.- The deadline, even when it seems scary, it is a necessary and natural 

part of the productivity life cycle (image taken from

 http://varela1.blogspot.com.es/2013/10/deadline-american-excitement.html)

I'm currently doing my PhD, and I know how the research area works. When would you say that I'm more productive? Yes, you're right, when a deadline for the submission to a conference is coming in a few days. Probably I could have prepared a nice work and then, a posteriori, check to which conference send the work. But things usually work in the other way around: you won't have anything substantial until you know where you want to send it, and until you see the deadline so close that you have no choice other than paying all your attention to that work.

And why making a game would be any different? You usually have many nifty ideas, you prototype new mechanics, cool!! But then procrastination dwells in your heart, and you figure out a new way to improve your original idea, and then a new even better idea replaces the previous one, until you're fed up with the original idea because you think of something completely different that is going to shake the market up with top-notch mechanics never seen before…Yes, yes, we all went through that road until we found an important stumbling block in the form of logical implications: no deadline -> no pressure -> no game.

This is also the reason why we (Manuela and me) decided to set up a deadline for the release of the game announced in the previous post: Chubby Buddy. We still have lots of work ahead, and we won't be able to address some cool ideas that we originally had. But otherwise I know that we would run the risk of never releasing the game, because we have so many other ideas, that it would be very tempting to blow this one off and to pursue a new one.

Game jams and reputable venues like the Independent Game Festival are excellent options to put a bit of pressure on yourself. Even telling your friends or your family that you're showing them something on a given day will probably give your productivity the required boost!

See you! (by next week hopefully… yes, I'm of course as deadline-driven as anyone else)