Dec 2019: Resolutions
2019 has been an exciting year for us at Tursiops Truncatus Studios. Our first PAX. Our second and third PAX. The launch of the public beta for The Day We Fought Space. Thousands of new people got to try our game. We made friends. People interviewed us. We were special guests on podcasts. It’s been great.
But… it hasn’t been great all the time. 2019 has also been a year of stress and depression. Of missed development targets, cut features, and release date delays.
I’m not normally a “new year’s resolution” person, but since I can tell I need some course corrections, I’ll make an exception and share where I’m hoping to go this next year.
1. Block off dedicated development time.
As we barrel closer to release, I’ve found myself wearing more hats than I’m used to — and if I’m being honest, a lot of those hats are hats I don’t much care to wear. One of the time management issues I’ve been running into is that I feel guilty doing enjoyable development work while less exciting tasks are looming on my to-do list. And then, of course, the procrastination sets in and I’ll waste time that could have been spent on development anyways.
My hope is that by blocking off parts of my week specifically for development time, I can put that guilt on the shelf and get more work weeks in that I can look back at and feel good about.
2. Make time to play more games.
Seeing all of the “best of” lists from 2019 made me realize that I had barely tasted any of 2019’s game offerings. I played the the Link’s Awakening remake, toyed around with some of the work that some of our new convention friends and #indieDevHour friends released this year, like Eagle Island and Tour de Shroom, and… that’s about it. A number of this year’s (and late 2018’s) best are sitting in my wishlists, or even added to my libraries and downloaded, but left untouched albeit with best intentions.
It’s a bit of a wake-up call for me, as I firmly believe that playing your fair share of games brings out the best game designer in you. Author V.E. Schwab recently talked about this on Twitter, and acknowledged that time to read (or, in my case, play games) isn’t a thing that you have, but a thing that you need to make.
People always comment on how surprised they are I have time to read. But I don’t. I MAKE time. I consider reading widely not only part of my job, but an investment in my own craft. Nothing has ever helped me grow as much as reading.
— Victoria/V.E. Schwab (@veschwab) December 24, 2019
3. Say “no” more often — and feel less bad about it.
Simple advice, but it has taken a lifetime, and I still haven’t mastered the most basic form of this, which is saying “no” and feeling OK about it. We turned down one event last year, and I felt awful about it… but, you know, we also said “yes” to a last-minute event and it really didn’t do us a whole lot of good.
This doesn’t just go for events, either. It goes for feature requests — which might be perfectly good ideas, but ones that we can do without. It goes for offers of help — which, in some extreme cases, wind up taking more of my own time to on-board and maintain than they’ve wound up saving.
In some other areas of my life I’ve needed to assure groups of people “Just because we’re not doing it doesn’t mean that it was a bad idea.” Maybe it’s time to take my own advice?