2008 In Focus

As you should have been able to tell from the year in review, my biggest obstacle has been my lack of focus. In order to fix this problem I need to know the reason for the problem. Sure, bandage solutions occasionally do solve the problem but often they only cover up the real problem. While I really do want to do more elaborate games, the big problem with elaborate games is that they take a lot of time to develop. Smaller games take less time to develop, so a lot of my time is spent working on smaller games so that I actually have material that can be released.

That, then, is my biggest problem. Worrying too much about the next release. Even when I am three or four weeks ahead of the weekly schedule, that is constantly harping on me. The obvious solution to that problem would be to drop the weekly format. After all, many of my visitors don't visit the site every week. Still, I have been following a weekly format for quite a while, so dropping it just does not seem right. At the same time, people don't like articles or open source releases meaning that I am caught between annoying my visitors with material most of them don't really want so I can devote more time to developing higher quality games or giving them more quickly produced games.

The solution then is to find a way of having more articles and open source releases without annoying the visitors who don't like them. Give them ample warning so they can visit the site only when stuff they are interested in is on the site. This is why I have made changes to the home page. I still have to make sure that there is at least one game every month. I am hoping for three games, as I want at least one open source release every month, but until I actually finish developing my multiple-episode larger projects this will not be possible.

The obvious flaw in this plan is that instead of worrying about the next release, I will be shifting my focus to the next month's game. While this is a bit better, it still draws my attention away from the bigger games. The solution to this is my dozen days project. The episodes for this project are Game in a Day challenges, meaning that the entire game is developed in a single day. If I did this live on the day the game was to be released, I wouldn't even have to think about the game until the day I was working on it and it would simply be a single day's break from my focus on a larger project.