Lately while I was working on QuotaFactory I found myself unable to figure out what to do first. From working on the Steam store page, fixing bugs, to adding more features. After about a week of this + a lot of work in the meantime making me unable to work on the game. I found myself lost.
Finding solution
After talking with friends and thinking about this, I figured I need some sort of plan, to be able to see all the steps 1 by 1. Which meant I need to find a project management solution. An idea I was given by a friend of mine is to just make a whiteboard and plan it all on that, personally I am not a fan of whiteboards due to it becoming a mess or spending too much time on how to plan out the whiteboard, eating up time to plan the Game.
Since a whiteboard wasn’t an option, I thought I could use Project management solution which is in every GitHub repo. Personally I am a big fan of these but, since QuotaFactory isn’t on GitHub I figured that having an empty repo for tracking project progress felt weird and if I ever wanted to add someone it would be weird.
After that I remembered the existence of Trello, which I quickly regretted as I found out that since the last time I used it, it has became an AI blob of… well not good in my opinion. Making it a no go for my own usage.
This lead me to finally checking out Jira I am assuming that for most people here I don’t have to explain what Jira is. For the rest though, in short Jira is a project management tool used in most IT jobs. Personally I never tried using it yet before as I found the previous solutions were more than enough for most of my projects.
Setting it all up
At first Jira was a little bit overwhelming but, with a couple hours of playing around I got to something I found useful for myself. Ended up using it’s List function to add in bulk tasks, like translations, bugs, game features, etc. After which in the Board function I just move the cards I start work on to the “In Progress”, after thinking I finished them they are put into “In Testing” which just means I have not yet verified all works good with it. After that it goes into “Completed”.
The bad
As I am getting more into the whole planning of the game I find myself more worrying about the plan than the game. Which I don’t believe to be good. Yes, I need to think about how I want the game to work and such, but spending my time just thinking about it creating a larger backlog instead of working on the stuff in the backlog results in slower progress from what I seen.
“Illusion of productivity” is what I’ve been experiencing lately, I feel very productive working out how I want the game to work and adding 5 billion tasks to do. Issue is I find myself get lost in creating all these tasks and making up ideas that give me the dopamine from being productive, to the point I end up not motivated to work on any of the stuff I added.
Another issue this creates is that thanks to creating a massive backlog it suddenly feels like the game is a huge massive project I can’t handle by myself and complete. Making the development even slower.
The good
If we ignore all the bad stuff for a second, I find that when I do create plans well, don’t overcomplicate them and balance the creation of ideas and actually working on them. It has improved the speed and quality of code I make. As now it’s not a “work on X” because I just feel like working on it, but picking out of a list that is already prepared of what needs to be added/made and then working on that.
It also makes me able to “forget” about the project for a day or two to take a break and then be able to within a couple hours know what I was working on and what needs to be worked on. Without having to try my best to remember what myself was thinking days if not weeks ago.
Conclusion
Overall I believe that having a good system in place to track progress is extremely helpful, allowing for increased efficiency and getting dopamine even for annoying parts like studying how does the tax system work.
If you are working on or wanting to start your own project right now. I’d heavily recommend getting the whole basics of the project setup in Jira or something similar and then adding/removing stuff depending on how you see fit. Though be careful as I mentioned of getting stuck in the Illusion of productivity as I call it. So that you don’t end up with 5000 tasks, and 0 code.