I’ve realized I haven’t written anything in a while now. So in this article I want to talk a little about Things that just need to get done.
Most developers, at least those working in medium to large size companies have the luxury of working a set number of hours and are assigned to basically one part of development. Weather it be art, programing, community management, etc. That’s not the case for me, an indie dev. So many things that just need to get done sometimes can be overwhelming. To make things sound worse, a lot of it has nothing to do with game development. How boring!
Lately I’ve found myself working on our website 2401studios.com. This is something I’ve kind of leisurely been tinkering with for some time now. I’ve also mentally thought about it as not a priority, since we already had a website up, although it hadn’t changed much for the last 3 years, it wasn’t very functional, had little to no SEO, and the design was too simple in my opinion. Why even bother with that right now? We offer game related development services as well as develop our own IP. I believe that the site is like our business card or like a brochure of sorts. It is a first impression to anyone discovering more about us online. I know that when I look at a company’s website that I’m interested in and it doesn’t look or work all that well, is missing parts, is hard to navigate, or maybe it has broken links, I leave it quickly and dismiss that company as not serious or not of the quality I’m looking for. Certainly that’s not how we see our work, nor would we want anyone else to think that either. It needed to reflect us as a company as well as the work we have done, but it just wasn’t something I or anyone else wanted to do. I mean, we are game developers. We’d rather be designing and developing games, right? Another reason it needed to just get done was the fact that we were planing on announcing things about our new game, Valkyrie Galaxy. That add to the pressure. I figured, most likely, someone would want to see more about us and the site wasn’t ready for that kind of attention.
So, how did I get it done? After dancing around with ideas, designs, and what to do with it, I realized that the only way was to just start with something, any thing. This may sound obvious but there wasn’t anyone saying it needs this or that, or even anyone saying that’s good or bad. Without a design doc you can actually feel lost sometimes. This happens in game development too. Especially when prototyping new game ideas.
Breaking it down into two main things turned out to help me get started. Adding all the old content to the new site and writing all the new things. Also making a list help me not forget to do anything. With this project I added all the things I could think of, that just needed to get done, to a checklist in habitrpg.com now habitica.com to make my list. Normally when working on a game project I make a list and divide it into two groups. Basically Needs and Wants. Needs are like: “It needs to have a menu.” Wants are like: “It would be cool if it had an animated menu”. For the website as well as games, it’s not always clear what features fall in group.
Working on it alone can also sometimes add to the procrastination. When working in a team I think things get done faster and the results are better because the feedback is right there when you need it. This was something that just needed to get done and I was the only one to do it. With my semi large list done and knowing I’d get no help and very little feed back about what I was doing, I set myself a Daily in habitrpg.com. I called it “Work on 2401studios.com.” For the next couple of weeks I’d work on at least one thing of the site. Checking off things I’d done from my list and adding new ones as they came up. Before I realized it, the site was at a point were it had most the Needs and some of the Wants which meant it was good enough to launch. Just before lunching I asked a few trusted individuals to check it out and let me know what they thought about it. The feedback was pretty much all the same. Everyone liked it, said it was a huge improvement over how our site looked and worked, and many said it looked totally professional. Great! That’s exactly what I wanted to hear” professional”. That’s the impression we want to make as a company. With that I launched and ironed out a few unforeseen bugs.
I am happy with how it turned out and now it’s ready for all the news about our new game Valkyrie Galaxy. There are still things I need and want to add to the site, but I can do that later. lol
I hope someone can take something from this about how they can tackle Things that just need to get done.