At this point I’m ready to admit that my approach of trying to work harder for fewer days isn’t quite working out. That’s not to say it’s inherently unworkable, but if I’m going to do it I need a little bit more of a framework. The huge advantage to my previous approach of working a little bit every day was that it was simple to remember and simple to stick to. More complicated schedules cause issues because once I deviate from them then I need to think about how I’m going to go back and readjust and whether I can dedicate extra time to make up for it or whatever. I’m sure that style of work comes naturally to some people, but I’m also pretty sure those people ain’t me.
Whatever system I come up with, then, needs to be dead simple. I’m currently thinking of maybe working Saturday-Monday-Wednesday on the game, Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday on commissions and other odd jobs, and reserving Friday entirely for writing the Problem Machine essay for Saturday. This puts me about three hours of work a day, which I guess doesn’t sound like much if you’re used to 9-5 work but is usually enough to tire me out, at least along with the other stuff I need to do to keep my life running. It’s also very very simple. So maybe I’ll do that, or maybe I’ll go back to daily work. Dunno. I’m thinking about it.
Anyway, as all this talk of finding new approaches and whatnot may have already suggested, this was not a super productive week. I mostly did a bunch of debugging to get collision stuff working properly, which was very spotty before, and roughly implemented stunning for melee attacks. The effect of stun on enemies is currently minimal, mostly making them stand there for a moment since the reaction and animation code isn’t quite there yet, but it’s a start. Polishing that stuff up is probably next up on the agenda, and then getting ranged attacks working, and then – well I pretty much said all this stuff already last week, so yeah.
Interesting. I find that putting the work in on consecutive helps me. Shifting my thinking and energy from one task to another can cause me delays, so working a task multiple days then switching limits my unproductive transition time.
It’s kind of a balancing act. At the same time, I want to cluster my work together so I maintain continuity as much as possible, but I also don’t want to cluster so much that there are long gaps because then I forget where I was at and have to readjust.