Saving Weeks by Taking a Week Off

2014-03-10

I am working quite hard on a new game, which I will announce some time in the next weeks. It's nothing really innovative, but it may be the first game I bring to an end (hopefully).

The last week I took a vacation with my family in Berlin. Originally I though that it would be a "lost" week, in the sense that I would not get anything done and it would push back my schedule by a week. So I planed the week with 0% availability, in my nifty planing tool.

I honestly wanted to take the week off, so the only electric device I packed was my phone. On the train ride to Berlin, I decided to take it even a step further, I decided to not think about any work while in Berlin. No engine design, no art concepts and style or work scheduling. I even did not read the books I packed, I just idled my brain where nothing was to do.

And it was awesome!

Just thinking about either the imediate future or daydreaming really helped purge my mind. Towards the end of the week my thoughts slowly crept back towards my work.

Two things where suddenly clear, I want to finish this project and move on to cooler more interesting ones and that I had started to gold plate.

My current little game aims primarily at developing technology, as a result some inefficiencies are to be expected. But I set myself the premise to only develop the technology need by the game. I was starting to severely stray from this principle.

Although I always have dozens of ideas for games at any given time, most of them are totally outside of my scope. But one idea crystallised as the next sensible steeping stone. But as a principle I need to finish the current project.

This lead me to refocus the development, reprioritise the work and reschedule everything.

I ended up throwing about 4 weeks worth of work out of the schedule.