One Bite at a Time

So goes the old joke, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

It’s a valuable reminder, which can be applied to lots of different things in life, but seems especially relevant for game development in general, and even the One Game a Month project. Early last week, I had a bit of a panic, looking at how much there still was to do on the January project. While it’s certainly valuable to list out things which need doing, and I’ve made milestone lists, and weekend punch lists, and nightly plans on numerous occasions already this month, it’s also important not to let those lists get you down.

I think most of us participating in 1GAM know this, but in case you’ve forgotten, the whole game is the elephant, and each line of code, each asset you create, each time you launch the game and something new works the way you’d hoped, that’s a big bite. It might not seem that big in terms of the elephant, but the thing will be done eventually.

It also raises a point that again, I think most participants in 1GAM know the importance of, but in case there are any real amateurs out there, this might bear mentioning. Revision control is your best friend. Seriously. I knew this to be the case, and still didn’t actually set up a repository until just the other day, when I started making really big changes and then panicking that I might have gone and broken things that already worked. Luckily I hadn’t, but still, I took the lesson to heart and immediately set up a local Git repository, followed by a web-based one at BitBucket.

I hear you scoffing at me for not using GitHub, but I like BitBucket having free private repositories, and if the size of my team grows past five on any project, I’ll be slightly shocked. I also found BitBucket a bit easier to get started on. So if you’re new to this whole thing, choose one or the other. Or both. Once the project is finished, I might move it to GitHub for distribution. We’ll see.

Anyway, this was a long enough break. Get back to work on your game.