It's the Little Things

Doing nothing but cleaning up for presenting on Saturday. Ready for my baby to get her harsh criticism. But most of all ready to share ideas.

It's the little things that make a product nicer. I implemented a screen shake today similar to that in Elama. It isn't caused by anything just yet but it works very nicely -- you can vary its intensity and duration and all that. It's nice. Needs a little smoothing for a dropoff but other than that it's great.

People are having fun playing the builds and it gives me confidence. If the 9th goes well I'll push a build out to a large audience, primarily full of people I don't know. I know the combat is shaky, and that's ok. I don't even care about the art, which is a first for me: that can wait. Because I understand now that these things aren't meant to be rushed -- it creates tension and lowers the quality of the product and everyone's time spent. The concept, the idea, and I dare say even a slight majority of the execution are all there. And that's a great start.

Finding the balance between "development" and "production" when working on personal projects is a challenge -- always has been, but hopefully will not always be. I'm starting to learn how it works; how to let my developer side flourish while still keeping to deadlines. And to be honest, knowing there was a small meetup on the 9th helped me with that: As soon as I heard it was going down, I set a deadline. And if I continue working on this project afterwards, I will set another one for another month down the road. And I will meet it. Sure there will be bugs -- sure there will be errors. But that's all part of the learning experience. And no matter which way things go for Super Virgin Samurai, I've learned a lot in this past month. One thing I've learned most of all is that I don't need to be in college to learn; that it's only the beginning. I always complained that I didn't learn enough in college. Maybe that was the point -- to really get to know what I didn't know. To get in touch with that side and learn to deal with it and even love it.

And as I push through ugly bugs and nasty blocks of code and learn more every day about what makes "good" code versus what makes "bad" code, I still don't hate the project. Some days I get sick of it. Some days I want to strangle the damn thing. But at the end of the day, if someone plays it and it puts a smile on their face...dammit, I did my job.