Call notes

A few days ago, I had a call with a World Famous Game Designer* who gave me some advice on how to run the project better.

He had lots of positive feedback for the game, and he said that the things I'm struggling with (e.g. features taking longer than planned to implement) are things that big studios struggle with, too, and there's no magic bullet.

On the one hand, it's reässuring to be told by a senior game industry figure that you're doing a pretty good job; on the other hand, I was secretly hoping he'd let me in on some kind of Big Game Studio technique that would make things much easier.

He gave me two key recommendations:

• 1) Organise myself better
  His assessment was that I spend too much time reacting and not enough time directing.  I need to carve out regular time for strategy and organisation.
  
  As a first step, he said I should take a few days out to work purely on an accurate and comprehensive task list.  (I can then use that to finish populating the Dev Trello.)
  
  He thinks it's better for the project for me to be efficient and organised than it is for me to be working hard.  I need to rethink the way I use my time.
  
• 2) Lead the team better
  When I'm working on a big project (like redesigning the sex engine rules) it feels like everything is on hold while I work on that.  He surprised me by telling me that this probably is the right way to work in a tiny team: the lead designer has to spend enough time getting the new design into a complete enough state for everybody else to start work on.
  
  However, he thinks that while I'm doing stuff like this, the rest of the team could be working on things like adding new scenes.  He said we'd probably need to creäte some new processes and templates so that new content could be built and merged without requiring much intervention from me (in order to prevent me becoming a bottleneck).  His advice was to spend some time with Hyneman planning the best way to do this.

He also passed on some cool technical advice (like a better way of organising text snippets in the Sex Engine, based on a technique that Big Game Studios use to manage localisation text).  It was a very useful call and I'm hoping to set up a regular check-in with him so the project can continue to benefit from his advice and experience.

Next steps
I'm close to finishing the new sex engine rules, so I'm going to finish those before making major changes.  Once they're done, I'll follow the advice and spend some time creäting the full task and to-do list (which I'll publish to Trello).

Then I'll have a talk with Hyneman and the others about the changes we need to make in order that they can implement things without needing so much involvement from me.

Today
Moar work on the Sex Engine rules!  I know that not everybody is crazy about how much time this is taking (me least of all), but it's nearly done and it's going to make every sex scene in the game so much better.  More info to follow soon.

Okay, that's all for the moment because it's 2018 on Friday and I need to feed my girlfriend before she starves.  I'll continue working on the rules over the weekend, and will post here if anything major happens (like I finish the new rules!).  If not, the next full dev day is Monday.  See you then if not before!  Have a great weekend everybody!

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* I'm keeping The World Famous Game Designer's identity anonymous, because this is a porno game, but I'd love to boast about who he is.  You definitely know his games.  :-D