After months – like, literally months – of saying I was going to focus on (ironically) focus and concentration, I finally go around to doing it. And it’s been great! I’ve studied up and practiced meditation. I’ve re-incorporated the Pomodoro system, this time with some legit success.
The end result? I’m getting stuff done!
My work to improve concentration also yielded a surprising side benefit: I discovered a new tool called KanbanFlow. I have fairly specific requirements when it comes to workflow tools – as a single developer who loathes bloat, it’s hard to strike a balance between features I want and a bunch of crap I don’t.
KanbanFlow is wonderful. It’s everything I want and nothing I don’t. It’s free. It’s fast. It’s going to legitimately help me from here on out.
HIGHLIGHTS
Discovered KanbanFlow, a new tool to manage my work
Good work done on (mostly) keeping my blog updated and in running order
Began to find success in meditation, something I hope to use to improve focus, among other things
Video games, to be specific. Seems like nary a year goes by without seeing a release or two that are rather quite good.
I had originally made this post to talk about my game of the year. It’s always a fun to think about and, hey, everyone is doing it.
So I began scrolling through the releases this year and compared it to the games I played. It only then that it hit me:
I didn’t play any good games released in 2016.
I played No Man’s Sky – bad game. Paper Jam – terrible. The Witness – pretentious garbage. Infinite Warfare – fine, but not GotY.
ClearlyI know that a ton of good games came out this year. I just…never…actually got to any of them?
That doesn’t even seem possible. Surely I played at least one of them, if only by accident. Like, maybe I fell onto a controller and began to play Dark Souls 3…?
Turns out that the games I played – the good games, GotY contenders, anyway – were largely from last year. Or the year before that. Or like 20 years ago.
Well, this is going to be awkward, huh?
WARP DOGS’ GAME OF THE YEAR,
(ASSUMING IN THIS CONTEXT “OF THE YEAR” REFERS TO WHEN I PLAYED IT,
NOT NECESSARILY WHEN IT WAS RELEASED),
2016,
GOES TO:
The Witcher 3
If you sat me down in front of some very smart, very capable game designers and asked me to describe my perfect game, the end result would have probably still been less enjoyable than the Witcher3.
It’s sublime.
It nails the humor and tone I want to see in video games. It absolutely crushes it with the world and the efforts it goes to build it up into something real. The story is fantastic. The combat is fantastic. Geralt – fantastic. All the characters – fantastic.
Graphics – gorgeous. Voice acting? Wonderful. Music? Oh my god.
Quests? Otherworldly. They’re all so good. Every single one of them – in the way they subvert your expectations, in how they play with your emotions, the themes they explore, the callbacks to the most obscure lore and myth.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
It’s also gigantic, but always in the right amount. It’s open world without quite rubbing your nose in it – no towers or minigame icons and checklists.
Don’t get me wrong, I still wanted to complete everything, explore everything and, indeed, check all the boxes. The difference is that it was always on my terms.
I did it because this world, these characters, deserve help. I cared. I did it to see the next thing – it was like Civilization’s “one more turn” syndrome, only it was the entire game.
What more can even be said about this game that hasn’t been addressed by countless others much smarter than I?
All I know is that as a game designer I am at once in awe and jealous of this world. There’s so much to be inspired by in the Witcher – not just 3, but the entire Witchering series generally – and I am overjoyed that they exist and are successful.
There are few games out there that can be said to have improved the entire industry by just existing. The Witcher 3 is absolutely, without a doubt, one of them.
Anyway. The Witcher 3: didn’t release this year, but gosh darnit it is easily my Game of the Year 2016
The state of our WARP CORP isalmost freakishly strong after a last-minute push of savings
The Extinction-Level-Event (ELE)is now at an incredible 28 weeks away. Unbelievable!
MEGA-MONTH lumbers past the halfway mark and aims its way forward to the finish line. With two paychecks and a birthday under its belt, you would think its insatiable hunger would, indeed, be satiated, but the look in its eyes is anything but satisfied…
SPRINT GOALS
There’s less than two weeks until I give my two week notice. Assuming my math checks out, that leaves me with just under four weeks to prepare for a graceful and prepared exit.
Unlike previous attempts at sticking to a series of goals, I’ll instead just dump out a stream-of-consciousness about what I hope to accomplish between now and the end of the year
A fully realized ‘pitch’ of what this game actually is
Mind Maps!
Mind Maps for the various features, themes, and emotions of the game
Mind Maps for the various loops of the game
Mind Maps, generally
A social media presence that’s not super embarrassing
A final name, and probably a URL to go with it
Also maybe look into rules and standards about names
Comment and cleanup existing code
Do some “fun coding”
Document coding procedures to better iterate over them
Another week of little dev work, but a lot of analysis. I think I’m just about done the analysis stuff and with just a bit of time remaining (less than 33 days, you might say…) these next few sprints will be big
I’m also incredibly tired tonight, so this post is going to be really bad. Sorry.
Highlights
Rediscovered mind maps and have really enjoyed the way they help me think through problems
May have seriously come up with the game title…oh my!
A lot of progress on the game’s overall pitch, scope, and key ideas. Or, uh, something
MEGA-MONTH MARCHES EVER ON
Lowlights
Having a hard time concentrating and staying focused. I need to really, uh, not be bad at that. I think I’ve put this in every single lowlight since I was born
What is game…?
Too tired, sorry
Show & Tell
HOW TO QUIT YOUR JOB AND GO BROKE MAKING VIDEO GAMES – THE BURN CHART
It takes some real skill and precision to quit a good job making lots of money to pursue a career in which you’ll make very little. It requires strategy. Foresight. A willful ignorance of consequence. I’m here to talk about my own process so that you, too, can self-destruct your finances
Today, I want to talk about my burn chart, which you’ve may have seen after reading one of my WARP DOGS CORP LOGS posts.
There may be other, more accurate names for this style of chart, so let me show you what I mean:
So, what exactly is this thing?
In short, the burn chart is the primary method to measure when exactly I’ll be out of money and broke as all hell.
It performs this tremendous service by looking at my current cash reserves each week and compares that to both a fixed and moving estimate of where I predict my cash reserves should be each week.
It then plots this all on a nifty graph so I can visualize how fast I’m spending and when exactly I can expect to run out.
Make sense? Well, let’s dig in some more…
FIXED ESTIMATE
This is the grey line.
The fixed estimate is simple. I took a look at our average monthly expenses and compared it to our average monthly income after I quit my job. I then simply looked at the difference between the expenses and income, and called this difference the expense delta.
Said a different way, the expense delta is what’s needed to break even each month – for example, if average expenses were $5,000, and average income was $3,000, then the expense delta would be $2,000.
The Fixed Estimate is simply this delta subtracted from my cash reserves on a weekly basis. It’s a steady, consistent march to $0, and it’s also the line I want to continuously “beat” each week if I want to elongate this project.
CASH ON HAND
This is the blue line with stars.
At the start of each week I’ll record how much cash on hand I have left. The difference week to week will be reflected by the steepness of the line.
They key here is to beat the estimate. It’s sort of like racing where you want to beat your best lap times – only it’s exactly the opposite because you want to go slower, not faster.
But what happens if I do go slower? Or faster? I mean, it’s extremely unlikely I’ll spend exactly $500 a week over the course of many months, and the move I deviate from the average the less useful the fixed expense line will be.
To solve this problem, I added the moving estimate line.
MOVING ESTIMATE
This is the yellow line with the circles
Like the fixed estimate, the moving estimate steadily marches to 0 by subtracting an expense delta each week.
Unlike the fixed estimate, the speed it marches is not forever constant, but rather is based on a moving average of my actual expenses each week
Let’s use an example.
Week 1: $400 spent
Week 2: $300 spent
Week 3: $500 spent
Over these 3 weeks the moving estimate would come out to $400, and it’d look like so:
Lookin’ good! My thriftiness has bought me more time to work on my projects
Now, let’s say week 4 and 5 look like this:
Week 4: $900 spent
Week 5: $900 spent
Now, obviously I know that spending more per week means I’ll run out of money faster, and vice versa, but it’s one thing to know something and quite another to visualize it
You can see how it shaves off 2 weeks from the fixed estimate – that’s a lot of to give up!
In conclusion, this graph does two things main things:
It gamifies the otherwise dull task of tracking weekly expenses, encouraging me to stay under spending goals and beat my previous expectations, plus,
It allows me to apply principals of Agile to my financial situation, adjusting my strategies and focus on a weekly basis
So, hopefully this has all made sense. If you’re looking to quit your job to pursue some passion then I strongly encourage you to make something similar – never discount the power of visualizing the speed in which your money is running out
The state of our WARP CORP is strong. MEGA-MONTH is halfway over and boy are the results promising already!
The Extinction-Level-Event (ELE)continues to hold at 14 weeks away. Astonishing!
Our team of highly respected accountants are slacking off, but are ready for the call to action later in the week
The astute among you may have realized that despite the rather salient header image Christmas is, in fact, not 33 days away. So what is…?
We shall have to find out together!
Thank you.
SPRINT GOALS
This is likely to be the 3rd week of very little programming, though the hope is to begin to ramp up as the week goes on. As has become typical, lack of time and overall concentration has contributed to a very slow pace. This pace is expected to increase dramatically in, oh, 33 days or so.
Here’s this week’s TOP 3P O W E R * G O A L S
What even is this game? Continued from last week, we’ll be focusing on what this game is and isn’t. I’ve also scoped in work on an actual, real-life, honest-to-goodness pitch that I can start to share people so they can make fun of me
Let’s read! a bunch of stuff. I have a huge amount of stuff to read that I’ve bought over the last few months and years. Books on game design, Lua programming, inspirational books, books on self-employment, and a whole lot more. So much, in fact, that it’s become necessary to create an entire POWER GOAL for it so I can begin to actually read the darn things
Improve your concentration with these ten easy steps. Well, maybe it’ll be more than 10 steps, but I really need to address this problem, so I’m making an entire goal for it. I must be better at concentrating and minimizing distractions…or I’ll be in some big trouble when I’m eventually on my own
