First of all: Avast! Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, ye salty sea-dogs! As temptin’ as it may be to write me whole post like the vicious pirate I be, I’ll not be subjectin’ ye to such tomfoolery!

Yes, it is September 19th, AKA Talk Like a Pirate Day. So put on your best pirate hat, eye patch, and call someone a “scurvy land-lubber” today!

• Talk Like a Pirate Day (www.talklikeapirate.com) – The official site of TLAPD

With that out of the way, on to more serious business…

When I started this development blog I promised that I would be open and honest about the challenges that I’d encountered throughout the process of creating this game. This week has been quite a challenge, so I wanted to talk about why.

If you start reading about starting your own business, a lot of the books or resources out there will mention as an aside “oh, by the way, you’ll be working alone a lot of the time, so make sure you’re OK with that.” The thing is, no matter how many times you read that and say to yourself, “yeah, that’s cool”, you’re not really prepared for the reality of this.

I’m a pretty social guy. My friends would be the first to tell you that I like to talk. I’m starting to find that working by myself all day is taking a bit of a toll on me. I’m talking to the cat more and more, for example. One of the things I really enjoyed about working on a large game team, at a big company, was the social interaction with the other members of a team. When I hit a wall while programming, I like to be able to talk it through with another programmer. Now, I can kind of do this over instant messaging, but it’s not the same.

At any rate, I’ve decided that I need some kind of social hobby in my life. I need to find a group to do things with, so I’m thinking of joining a photography group, or something like that. Something that will get me out of the house at least once a week or so and let me interact with other people.

The other thing I’ve noticed, is how easy it is to forget to go outside. There will be days where I’ll suddenly realise that I haven’t left the house for two and a half days. I don’t usually realise this until my wife asks me why I’m so grumpy. So, mental note: find some reason to go outside and do some form of exercise every day. Yesterday I was in an absolutely foul mood until my wife called me from her work and said, “you sound really grumpy, why don’t you go outside.” I grudgingly decided she was probably on to something, so I went for a bike ride through the park near our place. I felt 1000x better by the time I got home. The other lesson here: listen to your wife.

The final challenge I’ve run into this week is one of, what I guess you’d call, “designers block”. I’ve become stuck on the problem of the end condition in my game. I now have three new ideas on things that might work, but I’ve become kind of paralyzed by the problem and I’m finding it difficult to start coding up any of them. Instead, I’ve spent a lot of time this week working on my company logo. I thought if I took my mind off the problem that I might be able to come back to it fresh. However, in this case, all it has done is allowed me to continue to over-analyze the problem, making it harder to do anything about it.

So today I’ve decided: it doesn’t matter if none of the potential solutions I have work or not. The important thing is just to implement them and see if they work. It’s the only way I’m going to get past this problem.

To summarize, the lessons I’ve learned this week are:

• Find some way to get some social interaction, like by joining a club for a hobby you enjoy;
• Get outside and get some exercise every day;
• When you’re stuck on a problem, if walking away for a short time doesn’t help, then just dive in and hope that by pushing past it you’ll eventually find the solution.

That be all for now, me hearties! Yarrr!

Cap’n Owen

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 6:53 am and is filed under Design, Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.