Well, I'm back, and with more details about my hopefully-oneday-commercial 2D RPG, "AdventureFar". Ready? Go.
AdventureFar development schedule:
As I promised earlier, here's my desired schedule for AdventureFar's development:
I don't know whether I'll be able to meet the milestones or not, but at least I have goals to work toward now.
The first 8 days of this month was spent chasing down a weird issue with ATI's Catalyst drivers which were keeping my program from launching (Wasn't my fault - their most recent drivers were faulty, it had nothing to do with my code). I also spent 3 days focusing on how I want to approach the 2011 in my life, so I didn't actually get coding until about the 14th.
However, my Map Editor and my game itself share a good chunk of code in common, particularly when it comes to displaying maps, and my first milestone so happens to be, "Get maps displaying" - What a coincidence!
So even though I lost half the month, I don't expect to be any more than 5 to 10 days late on that milestone.Ofcourse, the late time accumulates from milestone to milestone, and not everything that needs to be done is listed on that chart - only the major things. Those small tidbits add up and take time as well, and unexpected/overlooked things I need to do might pop up from time to time.
Since I'm doing pretty much everything on the project on my own (only delegating to those who offered their help things I'm confident they can do), I'm already wondering how I'm going to code the game, make the artwork, write the plot, script the quests and NPC conversations, and ensure the world gets created properly, all at the same time.
But I have no managers or publishers enforcing a hard release date, so if I must go longer to make a well polished game, then longer I shall go. I'll just have to re-adjust the schedule every few months to accommodate incorrect estimations of time costs, but hey, that's to be expected. That's also one of the benefits of a schedule, I can see I'm actually making progress, and I can see how much needs to be done, so I know that I am in fact getting closer to the goal. Even if the goal keeps moving back each time I re-estimate my schedule, I know that I'll always have moved two steps forward for every one step the goal gets moved back.
It's more of a progress guide - a document set to guide and measure my progress - rather than a development schedule. A schedule is something you must keep, or you 'failed' and have to re-schedule. A progress guide is something that guides you to make progress, and as long as you are making progress, you didn't fail, even if you miss the milestones (that's the definition I just made up, anyway).
So, uh, this schedule is not final, and no release date is set in stone.
My progress guide is more than just the desired timeline; it also contains a breakdown of different steps in the different parts of development (Code, plot, content creation, etc...). Currently it's only 5 pages long, but two pages don't really belong there, and should be in their own document - detailed questions I'm asking myself to help me flesh out some of the main characters (I'll post that some other time, perhaps, but it doesn't really belong in this journal entry).
Here are two other relevant parts to my game's development:
