Goals for This Week (Oct 21-25)
- Show & Tell blog for Nothing to Hide. (accomplished)
- Playable beta for Nothing to Hide. (not even anywhere close)
Goals for Next Week (Oct 28 - Nov 1)
- In-browser playable tutorial for Nothing to Hide by Halloween.
Accomplished: Show & Tell blog for Nothing to Hide.
Check out Nothing To Hide's new site at NothingToHide.cc!
My original plan was to “take the existing code of the ncase.me website, make slight modifications, and publish it.”
I went further. Everything had to be open.
I used Piwik instead of Google Analytics, because I don't want Google (and PRISM) tracking my viewers. I used Juvia instead of Disqus for comments, because of privacy concerns with Disqus. Both Piwik and Juvia are as fully-featured as their proprietary counterparts, and in some aspects, they're actually better! Soon, I'll give this NCASE Show & Tell blog the same open treatment.
The best part? Doing all this was easy.
It didn't take much to escape the grasp of centralized services, thanks to OpenShift, an open-source PaaS. OpenShift has this great feature called Quickstart, which lets you create a new, self-hosted app in minutes. As luck would have it, a Juvia Quickstart and a Piwik Quickstart already exist.
That was a fun day of exploring new open source tech.
Followed by a few days of scrambling over Nothing To Hide.
Failed: Playable beta for Nothing to Hide.
First, the good news. I've done quite a bit of work on Nothing To Hide this week, and right now, it both looks and sounds awesome. Here's a gameplay GIF:
The bad news is this is still nowhere close to 'playable beta', at least by my definition.
Although I've been making great progress on Nothing To Hide in the last couple weeks, I'm still failing at the goals I set out. I had planned to finish the alpha by last week, and failed. What did I do then? I set a new goal to complete the beta by this week, and again, failed. My plan was still to launch the demo and campaign before the Stop Watching Us rally. Which is today.
I might be underestimating how much time I need.
But as I like to say, every bomb has a silver lining. By recording and recognizing the gap between my goals and achievements, I get better at planning projects. Drastically scaling back, here is my one, small, realistic goal for the upcoming week.
Goal: In-browser playable tutorial for Nothing to Hide by Halloween.
My previous goals for Nothing To Hide were vague, like 'finish alpha' or 'finish beta'. Not this goal. Here's the specific criteria for what I want accomplished by Halloween, and why. It's in a numbered list, which as we all know, is the most serious of lists.
- Create a polished tutorial, to show off mainly the mechanics and art style. Story should be minimal, and only hinted at.
- Playtest the full tutorial in person, thrice. I have quite a few roommates in this hacker house who have not seen Nothing To Hide yet.
- Make sure the game works cross-browser. While the final game will most likely be a downloadable, this is important just for the next few steps.
- Share it online on Halloween morning. Specifically, a Newgrounds frontpage news post, r/gamedev's Feedback Friday, my social media, and maybe a few forums. Emphasize it is a polished prototype, not even an alpha.
- Get feedback, attention, and possible collaborators. Invite people to sign up for my newsletter for updates, and make an open call for other artists to team up with. (one musician and one voice actress?)
Mmm. Making numbered lists sure helps create a false sense of productivity! All I need now is to set my desktop background to a 'motivational' picture.
Yeah, that works.