Breaking my Own Rules

Back at the end of November I posted about some new rules I had made for my work-life. Basically, I had said that I wasn’t going to do work, or read work emails after 7:00 PM each night. I had also decided that I wasn’t going to work on weekends. All of that went out the window last week.

As I get closer to submission I’m working more and more. Last week I did several nights of working late and I worked a half day on Saturday, and a few hours on Sunday. I’m already paying for it. I haven’t been sleeping well again. The problem is that when I work late, I can’t stop thinking about work, even when I’m supposed to be sleeping. I end up lying awake at night going over things in my head instead of falling asleep. So I’m not really sure what to do. On the one hand, I need to be putting in this extra time right now, but on the other hand, I do like to get some sleep.

The good news is that by working a bit on the weekend I was able to wrap up the Timed Mode for the game. I managed to put in a bunch of new animations including: a countdown animation when you start a timed game, some beeping sounds when your time’s running out (that get more frantic as you get closer to “time’s up”), and a new Game Over animation that differentiates between losing because there were no more moves and because you ran out of time.

I’m quite pleased with how the Timed Mode turned out and I’m also pleased with how long it took to implement it. It took about 3.5 full days of coding to get it all in and working, with all the new animations, UI, etc.

Yesterday I started planning out the 2-Player mode that I want to add this week. The biggest problem I’m running into is the screen layout. The screen is pretty tight in single-player modes for displaying critical information, but now I need to display info for 2 players. So yesterday I spent a few hours mucking around in image editing software playing with the layout. I think I’ve got something that should work. Now I’ve just got to build it and see.

I’ve given myself until the end of the week (i.e. Sunday) to implement this new mode. That’s about as long as I can afford to take and not risk delaying the project significantly. It feels like I should be able to do it. Here’s hoping I’m right.

Owen