Day 323: Game Over

Today marks the last day of National Game Finishing Month. I closed five tickets today, mostly content-related. Every ship that's in part1 of the game is now created. Every weapon that's in the game entirely is done. Even helpful standard addons have been made.

In conclusion, of the list I made yesterday, half of the items are now done. So now, the NaGaFiMo postmortem!

• What went right
  
  
  
  1. Effort The spirit of this exercise was to devote my Nanowrimo time to the game. I've done more than that - as of today, I'm nearly 4.5 hours ahead of schedule. If it were a novel, it'd be done by now.
  
  
  2. Learning While I won't say that I haven't learned anything from the rest of the programming I've done, I've definitely learned more this month. Specifically, I had to create new art via Blender, which I knew how to do long ago but have since forgotten. Making art is definitely out of my comfort zone, but I learned quite a bit.
  
  
  3. Atomic Coding The linked article talks about the practice with Subversion, but I've found it even more effective using git. Having a local repository lets you commit nearly everything once you've made the smallest workable change, yet not embarrass yourself by pushing out to the remote (public!) repository.
  
  
  
  


• What Went Wrong
  
  
  
  1. It's Not Done! The goal of this was to actually have the game finished by now. That didn't happen, but given that I actually put in all the work, I count this as a failure of estimation rather than of effort.
  
  
  2. Learning Yes, that was above on the 'what went right' portion. The downside to learning how to use a tool like Blender is that I had to take time away from the rest of the project in order to do it. If I'd already known blender or already done all this, I'd have ended up a lot closer to the original goal.
  
  
  3. Going Dark Though I updated the blog when I was done with major features, I didn't update daily. As I've found the blog to be useful in the past, I'd like to keep it up.
  
  
  
  


• What I learned
  
  
  
  1. This is Doable This particular schedule works for me. I initially thought 1.5 hours a day might be somewhat difficult, but though not easy, it is at least workable.
  
  
  2. Get it Done Rather than putting off seemingly unrelated work until it absolutely must be done, it's probably better to learn these things when it won't interfere with big goals
  
  
  3. People Might Actually Play This I've had a number of requests for the demo, which while being exceedingly out of date is still a reasonable facsimile of how the game plays. My novels have had only a few token readers, with the vast majority of people who inquire not bothering to actually read them. Everyone who asked for the demo has played it however, making me think that I may have better luck!