pouët.net

hhhmm, mostly i just made some fx.. then came the part where you had to mash them all together with music and graphics at the end ;)

the best times were when the day was spent with some work or study (8 hrs) and the night with coding and realising wierd ideas on screen. inspiration mostly comes at night..

nowadays i seem to have lost this and aim too much for ideas which are unrealisable just to be original. whereas most of the fun came from imitation or improvisation.

why am i writing this btw? just want to say that management is damagement ;)

1. Tell the wife she can go out with her mates tomorrow if you can program tonight
2. Stay up until you cant see the walls anymore (at my age, thats about 3am :-()
3. Get up and go to work but hide in a corner somewhere. Try not to snore at the computer.
4. Go home and tell the kid(s) mummy will be back later.

Repeat and rinse until demo is done or more likely the deadline is on you.

This largely theoretical as I still havent released anything bigger than 1k :-(. Lamer!

Adok: hansoft?

My method is to mostly aim for some very high level of quality, perfectly knowing that it cannot reasonably reached.

Then I do a minimal planification about what need to be done to reach the various intermediate steps needed to get the final level, ordered by order of interlocking (if A is as important than B but B does block somebody else in someway then I do B first) and complexity (start by the easy first).

This basicaly means I always have something that works, starting by the very necessary content, I show it to other persons participating in the demo, and eventually change things based on the feedback.

The idea is that if you start by the necessary and get feedback early, you don't have to much things to waste, and you didn't lost time at all working on very complicated stuff that would not have made it in the end :)

And of course there is the specific rules for the deadline. Do not accept any new material to integrate after a clearly defined moment before the deadline. There is the "demo" deadline, and there is the "assets" deadline. There is no way you can meet the demo deadline if 15 minutes before you try to intagrate a new scrolltext and new logo, knowing that it takes 3 minutes for the scroller, 4 minutes for the logo, that rebuilding the project takes 1 minute, testing the demo takes the time it takes to watch the demo :p, then there is packing, and handling to the organizers.

=> Pointless heroic last moment effort resulting in generaly in a missed deadline, a demo that does not fit the size requirement (shit the final logo does not compress at well as the temp one !), something that crash in the middle (fuck there was an invalid character in the text, bad size for the texture, ...)

Now well you will tell me that I explained how I scheduled the way I did the demo, not how I dealt with the outside world (girlfriend, friends, work) at the same time ;)

Thing is that if you work by layers, by iterations that are feedback related, it means that you can perfectly do something else between iterations (like going to restaurant with your girlfriend/wife). This reduces the pressure, and gives you some distance to much appreciate the real quality of the work you are doing.

You can also involves (a bit) the family in the process. In one of my Oric demos, I asked my girlfriend about the best choices of colors to put on a "3d carpet/checker scroller effect", in the end I show her how to edit the colors and to run the demo, she made all the colors by herself and was quite happy of the final result :) and in the Atari 20 years intro my gf wrote a part of the scroller too.

Shit, I didn't wanted to write something so serious. Forgot it was pouet !

It's all bullshit, forget about all I just wrote :)

1. don't spend time on pouet.net
2.
3. production

i work when i want (it aint much), but i work efficient, and always end up finishing a prod, so i can make a better one.

I save time by showering, shaving, brushing my teeth and peeing at the same time.

Writing things down also helps.

Mmm,. also uninstalling addictive FPS from my disc before starting with the next megademo marathon! ;P

_-__: OK, Hansoft. I see. I've only used MS Project so far. What are the differences?

(I'd have googled up a review if it were really interesting for me; just feel free to answer if you like, or ignore my question)

my method is stealing underpants

no. actually, nothing ever gets finished. at some point, you just stop and call it finished.

Which makes you a "Type A" personality, according to a test in an issue of Mad magazine from 1999, now all you have to do is throw "The fucking magazine out the window"

Just so you know.