State of the Game #244: Lets get personal

Hey there, nice to meet you! My name is Chad Mauldin and I am a game developer and I have a deep love for mechs and mech games. Some of you might know this and think I am being silly, but I feel a lot of you reading this right now might not know this. This is my fault.

You see, when I first started this blog series, I had no idea of what the hell I was doing. I had literally never written a blog post before and there I was, making a weekly commitment to cataloging my life as I made a game. Somewhere along the line though, I think I lost my purpose with this series. I turned it into a weekly status report, and I honestly think it lost a lot of it’s luster in the process. I know it did for me, as I grew to dread writing the posts, never feeling like I had accomplished enough for the status check in.

Well, I am here to announce the official change back to the original purpose, letting you know just a bit about how I am doing, as a person, during this process. Sometimes, I might even just dump out the weeks worth of emotions. Either way, expect to learn a lot more about me and my ‘process’!

As you might have gained a bit from the introduction, this week has been a big one for self reflection. A lot of looking back on myself and how I what I have done, trying to learn from the journey and make sure I don’t repeat the same mistakes. Sometimes that is much easier said than done!

One of the big things I am dealing with this week is the constant state of ‘busy’. Busy is a good feeling though. The difficult part comes when the amount of ‘known’ work, far outpaces what you can do in a set time period. A lot of times in the past, this has really lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed and I would spend at LOT of effort avoiding the work that needed to be done. Of course, this would just lead into the problem, making it grow, until it grew out of control and a 1 month release grew into 4 months…. 🙂

So, how do i avoid becoming overwhelmed? Well, to be perfectly honest, I am not sure I have discovered the answer here. Here are the things I have been doing.

• Lists – Lots and lots of lists. I use Trello a ton for this, because it tracks everything nicely and I can see the things I completed.
• Priorities – I constantly remind myself of what is important for the now, for the tomorrow, and for the next month.
• Separation – This one is the hardest, but making sure I have a hard separation between what is ‘work time’ and what isn’t. This ensures I maximize my time in development

With these things in place, I have found it much easier to rationally handle what is an ever growing list of things to get done. It’s a very fluid process, as support issues can violate all three of these items pretty quickly (like getting an alarm that the login server is down at 2am!). Overall though, it’s helping.

Now, I was really hesitant in writing this post as I didn’t want to come of as whining. In reality, having too much to do is an incredible thing and I very much look at it as opportunity! While at the time, it may not be fun getting support emails through the day, I would much rather have this problem than having nobody around to have support issues!

But yeah, overall, things are going good. Wouldn’t change it for the world! How are you doing?