The release date is easy, the work I’ve actually been dreading is setting up all the individual milestones that get me to that day. Tomorrow is July 1st which is, give or take 24 hours, the middle point of the year meaning I have about six months of development time before the end of the year deadline.
I need to take the list I came up with in the last blog post and assign completion dates for each of those development milestones:
- The first release version needs at least 16 levels
- There’s still a lot of work to be done, but I have six levels now, so, if I were to set a deadline up of one level each week for the next ten weeks, (assuming I complete each one) that would put me at the beginning of September with about three and half months remaining.
- Each week I’ll start a blog post with the idea I have and document my progress.
- September 15th, 2018
- Finish the basic car code editor
- Polish the car code editor to the point where it’s easy (or easier) to use. It doesn’t have any real features like move/delete or even save your code between trials. I won’t be doing anything like saving or loading older code so I just need to worry about the current work. Maybe we could save the program per level so if the player loaded an older level they’d see the same program. So how long would it take to do this? First saving the code between trials would take a day, then move and delete would take another day so I week after step one is complete.
- September 22nd, 2018
- Actually score the player’s progress
- I need to wrap this step up in step one, however, the current levels need to have a better scoring system as well. So this step is here for me to go back over the first few levels and add their scores. It should be easier because there’s not a lot you can do. Let’s just add another week for this because even though it may only take a few hours it will still be difficult to find time to do it.
- September 29th, 2018
- Actual Graphics
- Everything so far has been done with free assets from the unity store (or me attempting to do something with blender).
- Pick an actual art style (low poly, cell shaded, etc)
- End of October, 2018.
- Better Physics and Car/Environment Interaction (Was Damage to Environment and Cars)
- Make whatever improvements I can to the game’s physics to make it more realistic. I don’t like the way the car “smokes” and the handling could be better. At this point I need to look at how the instructions are interpreted and consider allowing the player to set the amount of time instructions last.
- Middle of November, 2018
- Better sounds
- Again, buy stuff or make high quality sounds.
- End of November, 2018
- Final Polish Stage
- This time needs to be used for marketing, polishing the UI, and other improvements. I don’t need to be making anything new by the end of November. I should even consider starting my marketing earlier.
- Release: December 31st, 2018
My guess is this will change somewhat from now until the end of the year, so every time I reach one of these milestones I’ll make a blog post and compare the actual time with what I projected here.
EDIT: I just realized I have not decided what this game will get released on. I’m thinking IOS/Android/PC. That seems like a great start to me and luckily it’s Unity and they have build libs for all those platforms.