The days between now and when the last blog entry was written were pretty hard. Not because I had some hard programming problems to solve, but because of procrastination. This is not the first time it became an issue, but this is the longest period of time where I did mostly nothing, and I feel REALLY bad about it. I guess I'm a bit perfectionist and wannabe workaholic who tries to work every minute of my life, but that this when the procrastination doesn't get the best of me.

Reasons For Procrastination

Before the procrastination started I thought that to become a good game developer you firstly needed to play games yourself. And this might be true, but when playing games becomes more important than actually making games, I see it as a problem. In the last week or so I became kind of addicted to games. That's because it feels like an achievement every time I beat a new game, and somehow it makes me feel good about myself. That never happened to me before. I mean, I did play games, but I didn't enjoy them THAT much. And I think this is the problem. I started enjoying playing games more than developing them, and this needs to be fixed FAST.

My Plan For Ending Procrastination

First of all, I will try to play less. I will make games a reward after I do something new with my project. Maybe for every hour of coding, I will let myself play 30 minutes of Metro 2033. Next, I noticed that most of my procrastination comes from me being lost between all the different tasks that need to be programmed. Well, the tasks themselves may not be the problem, but the fact that I'm not sure HOW I should do it is. To fix this, I decided that for each task I will spend at least 15 minutes to brainstorm ideas on how it should be implemented. For example, yesterday I knew I needed to make allied bomber plane airstrike which would target enemy vehicles. But I didn't know how to implement it. Where should the airstrike button be, how should it look like, what happens after you click it, should the game randomly choose which enemies the planes target, or should the player do so, and so on. To answer these questions, I turned off my youtube tab (less distractions is better), took a pen and paper, and started writing. And voila, after 10 or so minutes I had a small plan figured out. There's something about writing things down which make them more important and urgent than having them in your mind. Also it makes it easier for you, because you don't have to remember as much stuff.

What I've Done

Although I procrastinated a lot, there are still some things which I've done. One of them is the allied airstrike which I mentioned earlier. Upon clicking the airstrike button, the mouse turns into a target icon and you can select which enemy you want to bomb. There will be a limited amount of airstrikes per given time.

Next, I added some motion blur into the game, which is not necessary, but pretty cool I guess. Also added ambient occlusion. And most importantly I prepared the project to support multiple levels, since now there's only one.

Art

My artist is working hard on the last turret models. This is what he came up with this week.

Next Week

During the next week I think I will start implementing other levels, and finally will try to get the project closer to release.