All work and no play makes Kitty a dull boy.

All work and no play makes Kitty a dull boy. All work and no play makes Kitty a dull boy. All work and no play makes Kitty a dull boy. All work and no play makes Kitty a dull boy. All work and no play makes Kitty a dull boy.

One of my big downfalls with creative work is forgetting how much time goes into it, when each step is relatively simple I tend to breeze past it in my mind. I have spent years getting the hang of this and at least now I am not surprised when things take a little or lot longer than originally expected. Regardless game dev is relatively new territory for me so.. here are some things I learned for next time:

• It’s important to figure out where the game might end up before you create too many elements. Especially with sprite heavy games, I have spent a long while recreating, resizing and recolouring (not to mention creating) images for the game so it would work well for iOS and android. When I started out I wasn’t sure about where the game would live and I put too much semi-aimless work in because watching kitty’s abilities grow is pretty exciting.
• Optimize from the beginning – If it will end up being a function just make a function, if it should be grouped then group it straight away. There’s no point writing the same logic twice and fiddling with project structure should be kept to a minimum. The more chances you give something to break the more likely it is to break.
• Get more help. I have been lucky enough to get Darren Hackett on board for music sounds (which are sounding rad), this is a big relief as I’m balancing web presence, game planning/development, graphics and marketing on my own.

The game is coming along nicely and despite a heavy workload I have had very few bugs during development, this is partially due to my use of the Construct2 engine which has made design-centric development a much easier task to handle.

So let’s take a stab at this time frame thing. I’ll say 2 weeks from today for a playable browser based version of Kitty Boom! Wish me luck!