Time Allocation and questions about development

mystic 2628

Lately, I've been finding it very hard to make any progress on my game. This is mainly because of time and how little of it I have. I'm still 15 years old and I have important exams coming up this year. Now that I have to get homework and study done every day, I find it hard to make time for game development. Literally, I have about 2 or 3 hours on a Saturday or Sunday out of the whole week. For example, all I've gotten done this week was some slight improvements to UI and a lot of changes to the firing system in my game.

I want to know if my game will even be done this year if I continue to spend the amount of time I am spending on it. I find that I'm only able to make small advancements and i'll never be able to finally program a working AI into the game because I'm afraid i'll spend the small amount of time that I have trying to add an AI function that doesn't work even after 2 hours of programming and all my time will be wasted.

I'm thinking that I should just delay my development until I get a long term break from school so I can actually afford to waste hours trying random rules and behaviours that don't work. It's like, I want to go and make a game and be able to say to people and myself that I am a real developer, but at the same time, school keeps getting in the way.

jamie_c

What you are experiencing is not uncommon, I have a full time job, family, home, etc. and only develop in my spare time, which ends up being a few hours a week.

My advice would be to not take on too large of a project, that way you will be able to complete it in some reasonable time frame. My target typical time frame for starting and finishing a project is about 4 months. So knowing that I try not to take on too large of a project. I could choose a large project that will take me a year or more to develop but I know me, and I'd shelve it and never complete it.

Some day I'd love to spend my full 8 hour work day (+) on game development but right now I just can't do that so I choose projects I'm relatively sure I'll be able to complete in a reasonable time frame.

mystic 2628

Well, it's a bit late now, seeing as I'm already halfway through my current game...

Luckily, as soon as summer break comes around, i'll actually be able to spend 8 hour sessions on development.

Thunder_Child

Summer break. Thats how to go...if I only had a summer break...dang young kids ya !!!

mystic 2628

Well. I've started learning code along with a couple of friends. So hopefully, when summer comes, we'll be able to go and work on some kind of (hopefully 3D) game together, where we can get some real cool things done.

I've been looking to do some 3d world and terrain design for a while now. It just looks very appealing to be able to build a virtual world that a game will play in.