25/03: Overflowing Plates
A few days ago I finished my third party contract. As has been an unfortunate trend, this project had absolutely nothing to do with either Blazing Games or with games. I suppose that as the work was not game related, hiring a company called Blazing Games to work on your project does not make sense, though hiring an individual does. This does mean that I am between contracts at the moment, so if any of my dozen or so readers know someone who needs programming (C, C++, Java, Flash or even assembly language) send them over to Blazing Games and tell them that I also do non-game related work. What does any of this have to do with my April 1st overhaul? Actually, a lot...
The one thing that I did notice while working on the contract work, is that focusing on only one task actually increases productivity. One issue I have been trying to deal with on Blazing Games is that I have way too many different projects on the go at the same time. Part of this is due to the obvious fact that I am doing this work in my spare time so I obviously want to be working on something that is interesting to me. I have so many varied tastes, that as a result I always end up with way too many projects going on at the same time.
While I have tried something similar to what I am going to be doing in April in the past, perhaps I just wasn't quite prepared. I am thinking that perhaps my big problem is my insistence to putting something out every week. It should be obvious that one person is simply not going to be able to put out games of the quality that I want to make in the short time periods that I want. Another thing that I have to take into account is that the time I spend developing games, unless I am being paid for it, is my own time. If I am only putting in 10 hours a week on a project that my visitors want, those ten hours could have just as easily been put into playing games on the Wii so if it takes me longer to finish the project that my visitors vote for, and months go by with only article and open source releases, that will have to be the case. Unless I am being paid for work, I don't owe my time to anybody so visitors should be happy with what hours I do put into the Blazing Games site. I suspect that most of my visitors understand this (I'm the dummy just realizing this obvious fact) so I am sure that with only a few exceptions, my visitors will understand any delays between major game releases.
The one thing that I did notice while working on the contract work, is that focusing on only one task actually increases productivity. One issue I have been trying to deal with on Blazing Games is that I have way too many different projects on the go at the same time. Part of this is due to the obvious fact that I am doing this work in my spare time so I obviously want to be working on something that is interesting to me. I have so many varied tastes, that as a result I always end up with way too many projects going on at the same time.
While I have tried something similar to what I am going to be doing in April in the past, perhaps I just wasn't quite prepared. I am thinking that perhaps my big problem is my insistence to putting something out every week. It should be obvious that one person is simply not going to be able to put out games of the quality that I want to make in the short time periods that I want. Another thing that I have to take into account is that the time I spend developing games, unless I am being paid for it, is my own time. If I am only putting in 10 hours a week on a project that my visitors want, those ten hours could have just as easily been put into playing games on the Wii so if it takes me longer to finish the project that my visitors vote for, and months go by with only article and open source releases, that will have to be the case. Unless I am being paid for work, I don't owe my time to anybody so visitors should be happy with what hours I do put into the Blazing Games site. I suspect that most of my visitors understand this (I'm the dummy just realizing this obvious fact) so I am sure that with only a few exceptions, my visitors will understand any delays between major game releases.
