This week I reached a nice milestone: all the dialogues in the Powargrid campaign have a blobbie picture now. So no more need for placeholder pictures like this one:
Now to be fair, the dialogue pictures are not finished. The backgrounds for the final mission still need work and many blobbies, especially those I drew long ago, need a critical look and often an upgrade. Apparently there is some skill involved even in drawing blobbies ;). But at least every dialogue in the game now has a more or less acceptable picture to show.
This also got me wondering about what the best way to work is. Since Michiel and I are building Powargrid next to our day jobs, we only rarely work for a full day straight. Usually it's three to four hours during an evening (at least twice a week) plus bits of time here and there. We have a list of things to do and we also have a priority in our heads, but we don't really have a plan for what to do when.
So we usually end up doing whatever we feel like doing at that moment, or whatever is most urgent. And I'm wondering whether this is the best way for us to work.
My first guess is yes, since we like to work this way and it works for us (har har) and there is this feeling that having all kinds of schedules and targets may drain some of the fun. Also, there is a lot of work that simply has to be done in building a game and it doesn't really matter when it's done, as long as it does get done. So why not work this way?
Well, there are reasons. And that's why I'm wondering if in the future, we'll have to change the way we work. Most importantly, we'll go from building a game to actually releasing it. This means that we'll have to do much more things that can't wait, like responding to customers, doing marketing related stuff (about which we'll write something in the near future, so stay tuned :) and making sure the game is ready on time. On top of that, some work simply has to wait for other things to get done. So eventually we may want to plan things out a bit more.
In all, I'm not sure how we'll end up working in the future, but my guess is that we'll have to move to something with a bit more structure to keep track of which things can't wait. But it's also possible that we'll end up alternating between ways of working; more structured around releases and less so when we're (early) in the process of building a game.
Time will tell what way we'll end up working and whether this will happen naturally or whether it will require a concious change. I'm curious about where we'll be in a year's time. One thing I do know: I'm having a great time creating our game :D
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