Plan for David Michael

Planning & scheduling & a book recommendation.

The last couple of weeks haven't seen much actual progress on our project (which I hope to announce here soon). I've been sidetracked by getting 2001's taxes completed before yesterday's deadline. Always a fun task for the early spring... ;-)

I've also been focusing on getting the project's scheduling and tasks better defined. We've had a completed game design doc and development phases breakdown for over a month, but some more detail was needed to help coordinate the team.

We now have:
* Game Design Document
* Detailed Task List
* Development Phase Breakdown
* Development Phase 1 Tasks organized by "Task Groups"
* Tentative completion date scheduled for Phase 1

The "Task Groups" were created to allow multiple people to be working on the same set of scripts without having to coordinate changes, check-ins, etc, quite as much. Hardly a revolutionary concept, but a bit new to us since in the past our projects have been easily divisible into totally separate tasks with no shared code, merely common interfaces where necessary. Having everyone basically working from the same set of Torque source/scripts really drives home the need for project coordination.

Book recommendation: I've been reading Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices :... recently. While it has very little to do with game development (and can get very specific about certain aspects of filmmaking), it does provide a some nice information about being an independent that is generally applicable.