2 hour project plan

The last months were a bit difficult to stay focused. I distracted myself but circumstances were also not the best.

I always struggle with sticking to a topic as anything shiny distracts me. I want to try out something new now: Limiting myself to 2 hours of work on a project (at least for now). That's not a lot of time, but that's the point: I want to see how much I can get done in this time frame and how much I can learn from it.

Naturally, I can do only simple things within that time limit, but I think that's a good thing. I want to focus on the essentials and not get lost in details. Furthermore I want to optimize my workflow to get the most out of the time I have. I noticed that I spend quite some time on setting up boilerplate code and getting the project to compile. I want to reduce this time to a minimum.

A simple target shooter

Fullscreen

Above is the result of a 2 hour session: It's a simple target shooting game without any bells and whistles. You can go into shooting mode via UI and go to main menu again. 9 targets are thrown into the air 3 at each time and that's it. There's a simple counter but no win condition or anything. Not really a game, but that's not the point.

The timer I use to track the 2 hours also counts my sessions and it's evident I deal with too many interruptions: The work for these 2 hours was split into 7 sessions, and at most I got like 30 minutes of uninterrupted work done, most other times it was much less. That's certainly something to work on.

I think this game won't work using touch controls either - there's currently no unified input system in the engine.

For now, I'll continue with this project and add another 2 hours to see where it goes.