Rebuild the habit of working on my game consistently

Okay after having immediately written the week 3/4 update I just wanted to write something quick to reflect on the whole process.

First of all, I’m really happy with myself for the amount of green on my tracking spreedsheet for the first 3 weeks. I’ve gotta say that I really didn’t expect to be that productive and I think that I really did have a good habit going for a while. A few big lessons came of this month that I’m really happy with and I want to list them down here for myself:

1. I can indeed build up a habit in a couple weeks! It’s not only possible, but very achievable and even enjoyable!
2. It takes longer than a few weeks to build a habit that I will sustain “forever”.
3. I did a great job creating small goals for the 4 weeks. I did a worse job about assuming I’d keep the habit “forever”
4. It’s fun to keep a spreadsheet to track! And I really like my system of giving one checkmark for even THINKING about coding, 2 checkmarks for actually doing some coding, and then 2 checkmarks + a note for big accomplishments.

Anyway, I’ll try to keep up building on the habit. Tbh, i have a really really busy end of year so this may end up turning into a resolution instead of a consistent thing going into the new year. Either way, generally happy with how the month went!

Did I go back in time one season? Because boy did I fall off. No updates here in 11 days, and frankly little to no work getting done between then and now. So much for building a habit!

That said, it’s not all doom and gloom. Week 3 wrapped up the “get everything snapping to a grid” part of the project. Week 4 was supposed to be “multiplayer management screen” (like on those switch games where you “press A to join” or whatever)

I decided that that sort of screen is a pretty common need, so I could just follow a coding tutorial to do it an HOLY MOLY was that a boring task that I did for a few days and on the other end my motivation is absolutely shot.

When i DID finally sit down to work again on the 11th, i decided to just wipe all that copied code away and start looking at generic docs so I could do my own coding. This was a much stronger tactic for me.

So at the very least least, I’d say that Week 4 was about learning the conditions under which I would break my own habits. One of those is a boring working process!

Week 2 went great! I ended up accomplishing all the way up to week 4’s goal in week 2! That being said, I don’t think I’m ready to change my commitments. I feel like my lifestyle can’t actually support much more commitment than what I’ll end up doing in week 4, so I’ll continue tracking my work and hope that I can continue what I’ve been doing so far!

Couple days into Week 2 and I think it’s likely I should start rethinking my later week goals. Still! I wanted to post some updates on WHAT I’m ended up working on.

Most of my time has been spent re-reading code rather than writing (which is pretty evident from the ratio in my previous update).

That being said! I got a grid-tile system working for placing down objects in my game. I’ll probably post a gif of what the actual game looks like, but this one features looks like this: (white grid is a debug option to visualise)

And here’s it without the debug white squares

Week 1 was successful! I decided to track my habit building in a simple spreadsheet that I’ve attached with this week’s “choosing to work” stats. Surprising everyone, I ended up actually working significantly more than I expected to. We’re still a ways away from when I stopped working on my project previously, but I’m very happy to know that the goal of consistently thinking about the project was easily met. I ended up opening the project every single day of week 1, and most days I spent at least a few minutes reading code. There was exactly one day that I opened the project but opted to not actively work on it, which is well within my laid out goals.

Given that I outdid my expectations for myself in week 1, I’m giving some thought to changing the scope of weeks 3 and 4. I’ll be leaving week 2 as it is, since week 1 was very obviously the easiest to accomplish