There is an old saying, that time is as valuable as gold. Indeed, time is precious because to each of us time is limited. We just have a certain amount of time each day to fulfill our work, studying, the duties to our family, and to do other things that fulfill our day. Besides, there must be a reason that all businessmen, and businesswomen always value their time and they often have a tight schedule.
That is for general vision, let's scale down to us, we are people who work in the game industry. The area that is having a great speed of development. To all the game producers, project managers, and developers time is so much more valuable. Because we are all always chasing a deadline to reach our business. So what tips can help us to save our priceless time during the game developing process? Let’s find out.
Firstly, Make a task list
One of the best things to do to be productive is to organize your work in subtasks. Here some tips to create your tasks lists:
Every day create the task list for the next day.
Find the two most important tasks and mark the others as a secondary task.
Not more than 5 – 7 tasks a day.
To organize your tasks, you can use digital platforms like Trello or any.do, or if you don’t like digital solutions, a simple piece of paper will be fine.
Secondly, create timelines
Timelines are very important. They will give you the global idea of the amount of work and time effort that you need to invest to complete your project. To be productive, you should create 3 types of timelines:
Short term timeline: Useful to organize the work for the next short amount of time (from one week to a one month).
Medium-term timeline: Useful to have the vision of the project when it will be at the halfway of the development process.
Long-term timeline: Useful to give you an estimation of the amount of work to do to reach the end of the project.
Timelines will help you to find out where the obstacles are and the amount of work needed to achieve your goals.
Thirdly, Remove Distractions
The most important thing to do to be productive is to remove distractions. Once you’ve started a task, you must be totally dedicated to that task. So turn off your phone, emails and do not access any kind of social network. You can’t even imagine how much time you will gain by just that simple movement, be concentrated on your work and stay away from them.
Last but not least, build your own strategy
Here we will present you a great tactic to help you combat your deadline and at the same time guarantee the efficiency at work: SCRUM.
Scrum is one of the most used techniques in software development. It is marked as an “agile” technique which is composed of one development cycle that can last from one week to 4 weeks. It can be used to develop every kind of software projects, and can be used from small indie games to AAA games.
Phase one: define your sprint plan:
Each development cycle, it’s called a “sprint”. Before defining the tasks to do in each sprint plan, you need to define the goal of that sprint. For example, as a game developer the goal of your first sprint plan can be the creation of a functional prototype. Once you have decided your goal, define the time that you feel your sprint plan should last to achieve that goal.
Phase two: Define your tasks:
Now it’s time that every member of the team writes down his tasks to accomplish the specific goal of that sprint. As you can imagine, Trello can be a very helpful platform where you can manage the tasks for your sprint plan.
Phase 3: Daily Scrum:
Every day you should review the progress of your work and the problems that you had to face to accomplish your task. If you are an indie team where each member works remotely, this can be hard to achieve, but try to use Skype or Google hangout to speak with each other every day. This can help to keep your team focused on the project and understand each other's problems.
The last phase: Scum Review:
This phase must be executed at the end of the sprint plan, it’s helpful to review the complex progression of the whole team. It gives you an overview of the result of not only your work but others’ as well. Review each completed task and be always honest with your team members, tell them if there is something that doesn’t work as it was supposed to be and tell them if you think that some changes have to be made to improve the productivity of not only one person but the whole team.
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