The last weeks were a bit… cumbersome. My dayjob got a higher focus lately but I was able to still sneak in some gamedev related stuff and I’m very happy about it.
First of all, we’ve created Uplezz’s developer blog finally. The intention is to have Uplezz specific posts there while keeping my own blog here (or maybe I’ll move it to another, more personal domain later). If you’re interested please check out Uplezz’s blog at https://uplezz.com.
The blog itself has multiple purposes:
- have an active information flow so interested people can follow the progress we make
- have a platform where communication can start (feedbacks, ideas)
- grow (let’s be honest: start) our community
- later: it will serve as both Uplezz’s news page, and blog.
As a second update, I started using Notion to manage all kinds of game-related information, notes, plans, etc. I find it very useful as I can create infinitely deep structures for storing information on various parts of the game information, also it seems to be a good enough task manager to track my progress.
Since our goal is to create and grow our community I created a rule for myself: at least 1 article should be published per week in order to have a constant flow of information from our side. So far it seems the timeframe is good enough, also has the benefit to create some articles beforehand and schedule them to be published later.
At the beginning of 2020 I’ve started to create devlogs on Youtube, but after a couple of weeks I had completely abondoned that island of content creation simply because it took too much time which I didn’t had. With the new blog I started to create small ~1min long videos for the articles to present some functionalities. Probably next year I’ll revisit the topic of a YT Devlog, currently I doesn’t feel I would have too much to share in that form.
Last but not least I’ve started to improve my workflow on game development and hopefully this will speed up things, brings more joy and provides more motivation to have at least small, but predictable progress each week:
- With Notion I’m planning ahead some future next steps I’m seeing coming
- For the next week, I’m trying to figure out what I want to develop next. This also serves as the key topic list for the next article as well.
- While using Notion, I’m also using my tablet and pen to create hand-drawn drafts, map out some ideas, experiment in my head. I’m also using this part of the workflow in other areas of my days so it seems it’ll be one of my essential tools in the long-term.
- Each day I’m trying to watch/listen to indie game developer content at least 1 hour. Yet these are mostly just for following interesting projects, but sometimes I’m researching topics (like how to create animation in Blender, how to create a character, UV mapping etc)
One thing I definitely need to improve though: I sleep only 3-4 hours per day which is not even near to acceptable levels of sleep.
While these last weeks / months were so freakin’ stressful I’m glad that I was able to keep my head above the water, and I’m very thankful for all the help and understanding I’m getting from my wife on these areas.