This week has been an interesting one and I'm going to ramble on in a stream of consciousness type way about it. I've made some progress on the noticeboards, typed and chatted what feels like far more than the past month, and had a mini crisis of sorts when the living room started leaking water from the ceiling (for the third time, but in a different place!). I think the theme for this week for me has been coming to some revelations of a sort about self-imposed limitations. Maybe these were triggered from having a break last week and that gap away from the normal routine really gave me pause on what was actually going on. I think it had begun before, but especially the last day or two felt like finally getting a better sense of what is up...
Aside: Sometimes I wonder with these posts how many people read them or what they're expecting to read about (feel free to leave a comment below on that!). For me, I've taken them as a way of giving some insight into the very human process of development and perhaps also the cycles that my mind will often get locked into. When I write these I often quickly look back at our last issue but have never actually gone back to read older ones from being a little embarrassed in some ways about what I might have said. So I have this sense that maybe I'm repeating myself in slightly different ways, but then immediately a few weeks later I forget and get caught back up in the cycle of whatever is going on at the time...
With a long-term endeavour such as this project, I think it is inevitable that the excitement rises and fades and that we struggle to actually consistently keep going in an upward spiral of momentum, as there's always distractions and past habits to deal with. Weeks like this though give me more optimism about it when I feel like I've got a real buzz going on from stepping outside my comfort zone and laying out more of what I'm actually thinking (while trying to be humble that it is only my very limited understanding and experience and that I'm open to change).
Anyway...to get back to what I mentioned in the first section, the revelation (or perhaps just a return to sanity and common sense) that I realised is how often we impose invisible limits and boxes around what we do. Biases and habits reinforce us going in a certain direction without a chance to stop to think if it's the best way to be going.
To go into a little more detail, my work on code has for a long time been about ticking off features on
the roadmap. The general aim has always been to get everything to a 'first pass' level and then we can start refining it and putting it together. That approach is definitely in large parts what my previous developer experience has been like on the
Fable games...right until near the end the game is very rough and there's little sense of the solidity that eventually emerges. I think it could be argued they released too soon where another 3 to 4 months at that solid stage would get the refinement right that really hits the mark, but that's hindsight for you! It is undoubtedly a reasonably sound strategy for many games, especially ones developed in private, but not all games are the same.
In our case, we have an incredibly ambitious game and limited resources (no publisher, a small but talented team where each person has a lot of responsibilities, and limited time due to our budget). It's true that there is a lot of pressure/risk in that situation, but we have experience and boldness on our side to make it work. We are doing our best to mitigate the risk and we still have contingencies and ways to keep going as long as possible while the game continues to grow. So it's not a bad situation we are in, but it is one where the bias and focus has limited us and started to box us into a corner where it seems like there is nowhere to go. Code is still the bottleneck right now where I've been constantly trying to catch up with the myriad of ideas/art/sound/bugs/improvements being thrown around. In doing so, I've limited myself a lot because of focusing on the checkbox approach of mostly sticking to stuff on the roadmap. That's not to say that focus is a bad thing, but when it becomes obsessive (filling all waking hours of the day) to the point of ignoring other options, then it lacks the common sense to take a step back and see what the real problems are and what to do about them. I guess what I'm mainly trying to take on-board from this is to split time up so the focus has a daily chance to shine but that other tasks are not left behind, including the need to be communicating with the rest of the team - and to get in some time to relax and enjoy life as well!
To tie this into the week itself a bit more, the noticeboards were something where until we had a meeting I'd been holding back continuously on them (maybe because they aren't on the roadmap, maybe because I had so many other things to do, maybe because no one else pushed me on them, but for whatever reason it was only when I started on it that it began to unveil the impact that I knew was there but didn't act on). The very basic implementation of them only took maybe an hour or two, but I just could not stop procrastinating/holding back on getting something in there. Now that they are there, it's a massive relief and I can see how much they are going to add to the game. After the basic implementation, I've been refining them in a further few days to have two initial types ('cook wanted' and 'lost item'), to set one noticeboard up per haven, to get them working with save/load, and to refine the random generation of them to feel a bit more natural. For now they are in our experimental branch on Steam (for anyone interested in trying it) and we're looking at getting them put into the main branch in perhaps a couple of weeks, along with other efforts to address player feedback on the game.
The water leaking incident of this week was interesting too. I almost felt like I'd set myself up for it by talking up how it often seems that crisis pop along one after another that disrupt our flow. Luckily it wasn't too serious and I saw it as soon as it started so nothing really got permanently damaged. The interesting part of it for me was recognising that feeling of how that crisis just took over all thoughts and actions. I pretty much dropped everything else I was doing to handle it and get it looked into. It made me remember how when something unexpected needs to get done, I can just focus immediately onto it and decisions suddenly become easy because you want to get it sorted above all else. To tie it into the limiting factor of our actions, sometimes things like that need absolute attention but when we're talking about things carrying over days/weeks/months trying to focus on on one thing unrelentingly then that just ends up wasting time. The mind wanders and rebels against that level of focus because it just weighs down creativity and inspiration. My plan is to try and mix things up more. Namely, we've talked in the team about having a fixed day where we are deliberately not working on the roadmap/update work. Letting things wander for a bit before diving back into focus. I'm additionally thinking to take that further within a day where I try to concentrate for around 4 hours on the main priority and then to be content then to dip into what I feel like doing rather than what I've tried to make my sole focus...
I guess I'll go a little into the team's recent typing and chatting, which maybe other posts might cover as well. What it boiled down to is another case of each of us having our limited box of what thoughts we'd allow out. Holding back from saying anything because we felt like everyone else was too busy or not really open to suggestion. Also perhaps that even when things are said, the other person isn't actually listening because of their own strong feelings on the matter. When you impose that limitation (of not listening, not asking questions, not putting out thoughts), then what you're really doing is passively accepting the status quo and biding time for a point which probably will never come.
That's not to say that all thoughts are welcome or are good ones to say, because there has to be some empathy/trust and mutual understanding there! The question though, is if you feel passionately about something why is it better to hold back on it? Surely if you feel that strongly about it you want to speak up and test if others agree, learn from the experience, and let the mind move on? It's a case of reading the room as to how/where to do this but it could even just start with a simple question of "Is there some way we can talk about X, as I have some feelings about that?". For myself (and I believe other people too), there's a lot of irrational fear at times about opening up because it exposes something in your mind and has a risk that you're wrong. But is it a good thing to just hold on to a thought to the point where it becomes permanent yet gets no outside scrutiny from people with vastly different experiences? Is it not better to test your limits and evolve your understanding by taking that step? I guess I would just stress again that my understanding/experience is limited and perhaps the position I'm advocating is too extreme where some limits are necessary. Food for thought really and something of an experiment!
Looking back on this post it has become quite an epic and I've still got thoughts flowing about connections that I've just realised in writing this. For now, I think I might leave it there and see what folks think of this. I know it's probably a lot to take in and perhaps not that much talks about the game itself but I do feel like it captures a bit of the way our development is going and some thoughts that right now really have me fired up. I definitely think I need to keep looking back on this particular post to remember it when I expect otherwise it might fade away in memory as more new unexpected developments take hold and as my mind wars a bit against being so open. Anyway, thanks to all of you who read this and I wish you all the best!
