From Dream to Reality: 9 Years of Consistent Updates to My Indie Game

I have been working on my game Pixel Art Academy for 9 years now it has started all the way 9 years ago on Kickstarter and yeah 94 updates later I've been keep updating it never giving up so I just wanted to share how I've been able to work on this project for 9 years today I want to talk about production what kind of production methods I used I've done a lot of mistakes along the years and then some good ones that have stuck with me and a first one I want to talk about is reverse flowcharts reverse flowcharts basically means breaking things down from the end resol backwards so if I want to have a finished Kickstarter these are the features that I promise on the kickstarter that I want to do and then each one of those breaking down I have a bunch of reverse flow charts here most of these ones I've done in 2018 when I significantly optimized my production really got things going in 2018 I really started feeling better about how slowly the production was going because in 2016 I was doing my master's degree in education where I was designing the game and then in 2017 I was creating all the infrastructure for the text Adventure parts of the game so I've done a lot of stuff but it was just not focused enough on actually delivering the things that I promised on the kickstarter so I needed to focus down and I made this and it worked quite well so back in 2018 I was working on on this back to school episode here's the reverse chart for that for chapter one by the way reverse flowchart the whole point is that as you're breaking this down back to the left you also then very naturally come to the point of well what should you start working with here you can see eventually I started working on the Pixel Boy now it's called pixel pad and all of these apps all of this stuff on the left I've completed in 2018 but the problem was with this little task all until that point until that task I was just churning out all of these features I've been recording the dev vogs everything is going going great and then I went came to this study groups feature and at this point I decided I want to visualize how you are meeting your fellow classmates I wanted you to be able to see others when you meet them and so I needed to create my Graphics engine and this one task here in the grand scheme of things is very little but it actually took me a whole year just to do this so what happened well I didn't really have any sort of deadlines for how long each one of these tasks need to take I have a very complicated relationship with deadlines because I am the kind of person that will push myself to try and reach them and I will push myself over the limits and one thing that I promised myself when I finally was able to start working on on my own game is that I will not let myself burn out I'll talk about this a little bit later as well suffice you to say deadlines the way I had them in the start of things were just not healthy and so I stopped setting deadlines for myself developing the graphics engine actually took quite a long time because I created this very special 2D pixelr to 3D thing crazy math going on interesting results in the end and then all of this car customization took a long time to create and the longer I kept working on it and not releasing anything out the more I felt like oh it needs to be something really good when I do eventually put it out one thing I should mention is that yeah pixelart Academy was always meant to be released in short quick increments and stopping that development cycle really really crippled me so in the end the solution was not to have no deadlines but to bring them into the big picture with a different approach now this might seem obvious to everybody who's using Agile development already Sprints definitely made the big difference to return to the quick release cycle that I was able to do now for 1 and A2 years with learn mode and there's especially one important factor how I made this happen one very important planning tool I already developed when I was doing these reverse charts was that I was you can see here these different lines around these different tasks I was mapping which features are necessary for me to deliver on this idea have a solid outline and then dashed ones are not so important and then the dotted ones are even less important and so as I was planning all of these features I was able to prioritize and you can see then I was able to just develop the ones that are the most important the priation really worked well so I am also bringing it into my Sprints I do two week Sprints that's a very classic thing and at the start of the Sprint I plan out all the cards I'm using codex nowadays which this free task tracking tool for Indi game developers specifically here's the example Milestone 4 developing the pinball creation kid game you can see all of the features that I wanted to do are split between high medium and low priority which helps me actually hit the two we mark because I'm going to be only focusing on the high part and if I finish all of the high priority task I'm happy in this case I was actually able to get to the medium as well but there's plenty of features that I would want to do that I just could not squeeze into those two weeks whereas in the past in the previous approach when I didn't have deadlines I would just just develop all of the features because I thought they were interesting and I wouldn't have that cut of dat so having development Sprints really did in practice work out so well for me because it forces me at the end of each Sprint I also have a build that I can give back to my Alpha X's backers and patrons and it keeps the Cadence going it makes me throw out the features that are not necessary and just keep the focus keep it going how did these three things reverse vol charts prioritization Sprints work out in practice for me to be able to really keep a very fast pace on a learn mode I was just developing while here in my planning tool on my iPad this is a reverse flowchart for Pixel Art Academy learn mode and now here what is useful about these things it does take a little bit of practice and experience but I know that each one of these I know that it can be a Sprint now why is that important well because just looking at this image and seeing how many features I put on there is going to let me know how long I'm going to be developing this that is something I didn't do before my mentality was just I'm going to have to work on all of them so I'm just going to pick one by one and I'm going to be breaking them down and I'm going to be spending as much time as I want on each one of these boxes but here I had a little bit more wisdom now I was able to put all of these features down into a calendar here and each one of these boxes I can put it I know that it's going to take me one Sprint back then I did two week sprints on the game and then two week Sprints working on my PARTA job at the indest so I only had one Sprint per month and here they are and so I was able to see I was able to focus and see that hey I will only be able in this time in one year that I want to get this game out I'm only going to be able to get these many features out and it's clearly obvious that only only the jagas will be able to get done in a year so I was actually able to get all of these Sprints in almost as planned one of these Sprints did turn out to be a little bit too big so I did break it down into two parts and then one extra Sprint came in the Audio I think because I really thought okay I need to get this done for the demo so that it sounds better so whereas I thought I would have the demo done in July in the end it actually being two months later in September but I was pretty good like being just two months off not that bad of a result so now I have my demo up on Steam I have to replan the rest of the Sprints because I have all of this new information don't be afraid to replan things and there's no point in sticking to uh plans that you've done half a year ago when you didn't have this information so this has been my next Sprints then planned out with all of this knowledge I knew which learning tutorials I need to still put in and the challenges the projects that I want to have with the pimble construction kit and then the polishing I wanted to put in the music and update the server so I can release it to my Kickstarter package which is what I've done today and yeah based on this again I see I can know which Sprints I need to create so here I have outlined which Sprints and I number them and I quickly see that at this point if I do one Sprint per month this is going to take a whole another year there's 12 Sprints left to do and so I knew that okay I need to speed up my Cadence and just do backto back Sprints if I actually want to get this done somewhere in 2024 I've also here grouped some of the Sprints together then I put in the date when these Sprints could be completed and in here in red even more uh tight little schedule and I actually managed to then hit these dates we will be hitting the Monday August 5th Early Access release just on time I still have one month to polish some of the things and do some bug fixes so in summary break all the features down with reverse flowcharts what are all the features that are needed to get you to the end result and then line up the Sprints that you need see where they come up on the calendar and see whether this is going to work out for you and then then you can re-evaluate depending on how quickly you want to get the game out and then when the Sprint starts breaking down into individual tasks prioritize them what's absolutely necessary what would be cool to have and what's a very nice feature but nobody's going to notice if it's not there and then do your best have two weeks just keep on going sometimes you're going to be able to get almost everything done especially at the start when I was doing sprints that were a little bit less crazy ambitious and more straightforward I was just able to get everything done sometimes you will have Sprints where you will put in extra time and work because you're passionate about it the pimble project was just so much fun to do I really really put a lot of effort points here on the board and then sometimes life's going to happen and you're not even going to be able to get through all of the high priority stuff and that's why I'm releasing the game into Early Access I really developed the alpha mindset I just wanted thought it was funny to say this what I mean by this is that yeah my game is going to go into Early Access I am releasing Alpha access versions and this allows me to ask myself is it good enough yes it is I can just move on Alpha mindset means I can always improve it later right now it just needs to be good enough and that gave me the permission to not be perfectionistic about things and just it's good enough move on and that's how I'm able to cut all of these features and just keep on going but to contrast that a little bit I also allow myself to enjoy the details the problem in the past was that I was indulging all of these crazy ideas that I have but there would be crazy ideas about making a graphics engine and then to figure out how the graphics engine work you have to really understand how light works and to understand how light works I did all these crazy simulations that just took me down rabbit holes that took months to develop and while it gave me cool results and maybe people were impressed by it it didn't really take me closer to the goal of developing the most important features so that's not what I'm talking about here when I'm saying enjoy the details but it is to allow myself to work on these little small features that really show the passion I have for this project an example of this is when you get to the Macintosh I really wanted to create this CRT effect that you can see here and on the left you see I asked people hey can they give me photographs of the actual MacIntosh and then I tried to create a CSS effect that closely resembles it now this was initially a low priority feature but because it was such a small one and it would show the kind of passion I have for this project I could still get it done in a day I felt like yes I should allow myself to work on this small little things similarly I try to do all of this kind of any user interface I want it to be animated I do spend the time to polish this kind of small details and making the user interface feel really good these are the kind of details I do let go in because they take a small amount of time but have a really big impact of showing how much you love this project and people really appreciate it and always comment on how the user interface feels really smooth just doing all of this kind of little tiny animations and then also sound effects and rotating things sure again I don't let myself go overboard initially those things didn't really rotate because I just had to move on the Sprint was over but then people were really hey you should why aren't they rotating they really wanted it and then I put it in and everybody was happy extra happy I could say because I did take some time to put those kind of features in so yeah allow yourself to do those kind of things high impact low effort and as you're going along with your Sprint plan everything as you can see in my notebooks I just plan I have notes for everything because it's just so much faster to develop things down on paper before jumping into code before jumping into drawing and stuff just plan it out first at least that's what works really well for me and when it comes to even more complicated software architectures I will go once step further and do proper class diagrams as we were taught in software engineering school yeah because it lets me quickly move on without having to Boggle down with code I just plan out the functions I write down my program flows the features that it needs to create and then just in my head I'm able to just jump from one to the other method as I'm going in my head how these methods will be having to call each other making sure that there are all the connections that all the methods are in place I've been already talking about this in my previous YouTube uh series pixel engine and that's how hopefully Pixel Art Academy will come out in August now almost as planned it didn't take me one year but it took me one a half years which is still pretty good things always St longer in video game development so hopefully you were able to get something useful out of this I have three more topics I want to talk about going to be three more videos so subscribe if you haven't yet and uh wish list the game to help me out all right cheers

Channel: Retronator

Views: 5,499

Keywords: indiegamedev, gamedev, gamedevelopment

Id: tZI2QZWXyZs

Length: 16min 6sec (966 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 05 2024