Solo Development Project Management

[+Gemintronic]

I've tasked myself to make a complete game in a finite timeframe. This is something new to me with homebrew development. Or, at least new in that I have not given myself as much time for winging it this time around.

 

How do you handle project management for solo homebrew games? Does Agile, Scrum and whatnot scale for such projects? Should I use something like Hack n Plan?

 

I'd appreciate any experiences or ideas from my fellow AtariAge members. I chose this section is it's an Atari 2600 title.

 

 

Happy Friday!

[Mr SQL]

Limited timeframe? Development isn't linear, follow the model below and keep inspired; code for 20 hours straight when you are inclined then eat and sleep like a Cat.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRMPmh-x6-Y

 

Drink coffee and eat Doritos, potatochips, Pizza and other high cholesterol foods you should not, go off your diet, ignore your Dr's advice if you're coding and it keeps you inspired; you have to use your judgement of course, these are just my ideas.

 

Agile and scrum? Jira experts can play that game like Jenga; more like Jumannjii really because entire projects disappear into the jungle while the same players always rack up plenty of milestones without producing anything but Jira tokens.

 

 

[azure]

I think a text editor and a task list works. That's not an exciting answer, but a fancy editor might make task tracking more exciting.

 

When solo projects use project management software, they tend to use it to communicate current progress with clients, document features in the contract, and provide justification for billable hours. When team projects use it, they're using it to organize, allocate, and coordinate tasks between teammates in addition to those other reasons.

 

Is it worth it for a solo 2600 project in which there's no client? I'm unsure, because there's so much R&D and re-work involved. Any progress reports and burndown charts are going to be unreliable or misleading, because they will be documenting tasks that go in and out of completed status as they're reopened and redone multiple times. I think the information produced will be of mostly of informational value as opposed to something you can make decisions on.

 

And there's also the creative aspect. How do you plan creativity? Hmm.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Use Git (locally or e.g. via GitLab/GitHub) and commit frequently. This will help you finding bugs which are not obvious and allows you testing of ideas without risk.

 

Besides that, a task list should do.

[+Gemintronic]

I appreciate the advice! I've installed Git to compile Stella before.. but, now I've actually set up an account. Definitely going to keep up with doing a task list. Hold off on the fancy proceseseses except for a Kanban board. Also, not stress over diet per MrSQLs recommendation

[DirtyHairy]

I appreciate the advice! I've installed Git to compile Stella before.. but, now I've actually set up an account. Definitely going to keep up with doing a task list. Hold off on the fancy proceseseses except for a Kanban board. Also, not stress over diet per MrSQLs recommendation

Both github and github provide an issue tracker. Even if you are developing alone, the tracker can be useful. Git itself has very sophisticated support for branching; even alone, this can be very useful for trying out new ideas. There is also git-bisect which helps you tracking down regressions in the history.

 

I found that Trello works well as a simple Kanban board. I don‘t think Scrum makes any sense if you are working as an individual rather than a team, but I think that there are several aspects of the agile mindset that are useful if you are working alone on your own product: iterative development cycles, simplicity and flexibility over intricate and complicated solutions, experiments and early incorporation of user feedback, and probably more. Translating some of those to a platform as constrained as the VCS may be a challenge though