I work full-time so I didn't really have the time or energy to work on my game much during the week. But I've got tomorrow off so I'm planning on just working straight through to the deadline to make the best, most complete game that I can.
I've got energy drinks and gummy worms to help keep me awake and happy through the night.
Is anyone else going for a big last second crunch? Or are you all better at time management then me?
Having to balance game dev with full-time work isn't a sign of being bad at time management, imo - that's a really tough thing to do!
I'd like to pull an all-nighter, but I'm still recovering from a bad cold and don't have any of the caffeinated drinks I like, so I may not be able to. I'm definitely also going to be working right up to the deadline, though! I'm genuinely bad at time management and have done embarrassingly little work on the final assets of my game.
Best wishes to you and everyone else who's in crunch time! We can do it!
College classes started for me so I haven't been able to get as much done as I wanted oop
But I also room with my boyfriend and he needs to sleep way before I do, so I don't think I'll end up working too late even if I want to. Fortunately I've got most of my stuff coded so I am in okay shape to enter cRUNCH TIME MODE
* Working through the night, Hiroshi fixed the Unfinished Game.
* It became the Completed Project.
Incidentally, it's actually rather common for developers facing a deadline to put the work before their own health. Square Enix was particularly known for having a dev room and in almost every game where one appeared there was one personified staff member who remarked on having lost so much weight, or who was very hungry, or maybe they were just feeling really poorly.
Although it was not my intention, I certainly placed my own needs after that of the game I was working on. While I did take a day off or two over the previous weekend because of things like family or just getting out of the house for a bit, this week has seen a lot of rushing. The more I wanted to get the game completed, the more problems I seemed to run into. A friend kept wanting to have me watch their stream, another friend repeatedly pestered me on Steam Chat (I eventually logged off, though I felt badly), and then the last two days or so I've started feeling a bit ill.
However, it's entirely possible that last bit is a coincidence, or due to the stress of a deadline, rather than actual neglect on my part. It was very important to me that I do complete this project, though. It's the first real undertaking in some years that I've managed to see all the way through. It gave me a boost of confidence I needed to perhaps work on some more RPG Maker projects after this is over, though it may not be for some time.
Truth be told, I am not really satisfied with how this turned out. Even though it still looks and feels really good, I had to sacrifice at least half of the stuff I had planned. So even though it has a beginning and ending, it was not the conclusion I had planned, but once I had committed to shortening it I made sure it felt appropriate and not simply phoned in the way some AAA RPGs have felt in the past. I must confess, though, that it's still rather info-dumpy like the AAA games I just mentioned.
I used to be able to pull all-nighters. Like, with no problem.
And... And then college ended. And I think my body just said "Yeah I don't need to do this anymore".
So, instead of falling asleep at 2:30AM in front of my desk, I fall asleep at 9:45PM in front of it. And then wake up at 8AM with a dog staring at me like why am I not in bed... I don't think I could do an actual all-nighter even if I tried anymore haha. Luckily, I was able to nix a few potential plans and think of something that will probably be decent enough for jam turn-in at least. While I feel like other people could have done as much as I have done in a regular, 48-hour jam, and in an even better quality probably (ESPECIALLY my menu screens, ha).... I'm proud of myself to be able to finish something.
Despite that, I'll be yelling at myself that I couldn't done better when I turn this in. I'm just gonna tell myself that all I can do is just do better in the next jam I participate in. Also that the end of this jam doesn't mean I can work on this game more!
At around 5am last night (which is actually half an hour later then I usually wake up for work) I started dozing off WHILE writing code and waking up to find weird stuff in the code, so I went to sleep for about 3 hours. Now I'm back at it! I'm mostly done, I just need to go through and add all the art in, really, and do some testing. I think I should still make the deadline.
And Hiroshi, I know how you feel. I also had to scale my game back A LOT to meet the deadline.
Well, thanks to family interference, I've now been up over 28 hours and the last time I ate was roughly 12 or so hours ago. I'm a Diabetic so that's probably not a good thing, but I got some emergency blood sugar a little bit ago, so I'll be fine. I was about to submit my game when they were like "hey, we're going to the store" and of course it's never JUST the store, so I got dragged around a while.
On the plus side, I can finally submit my game.
