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DodgeFoot Released

September 16th, 2011 | Posted by mvi in Production - (0 Comments)

My first Facebook game, DodgeFoot, has just been released. I’ve been working on it the last four weeks part-time with a couple of friends from University. It was the first time we’d made a game for Facebook and it was also the first time we’d made a game with the Unity3D game engine.  It was a great experience and I will be releasing a post-mortem very shortly, but in the mean time:
Please check out the game :-)

Notepad++ ToDo – A Simple Task Management System

August 28th, 2011 | Posted by mvi in Production - (0 Comments)

There are dozens of methodologies for project and task management, with focusses ranging from behemoth software solutions which are several years between major releases and social games with very high iteration and weekly releases. This article is not intended for either, however if you find at times keeping track of your work on small projects is most efficient with pen and paper or in notepad then you may find it of interest. It is easy to initially overlook its simplicity as a flaw, but I think in certain cases it presents itself to be extremely advantageous.

Unlike complex task management systems which create a good deal of overhead I try to emphasise simplicity in my task management of small projects and make use of Notepad++ for storing them. I group tasks into four categories:

  1. Done – Task is complete
  2. Parole – Task is believed to be complete, requires testing to ratify its completion
  3. Pending – Task is not started or is not complete
  4. Obsolete – Task is now longer considered required
I make use of Notepad++’s User Defined Language feature with syntax highlighting for each category. To set this up simply follow the following steps:
  1. From Notepad++’s view menu select User-Defined Dialogue to bring up a popup
  2. Click the Create New button and call it “ToDo”
  3. Click the Keywords Lists tab
  4. You’ll know see four keyword boxes, put the following in each respective box (including the colon):
    1. Done:
    2. Parole:
    3. Pending:
    4. Obsolete:
  5. Set the colours of each keyword to what you desire, I tend to use green, orange, red and grey respectively, I also check the bold box of each so that the keyword stands out more
  6. Finally create a new document and start some entries prefixing each with a category from step 4 and follow it by a space to ensure the following word doesn’t also get highlighted. Select Language and select ToDo to enable the new highlighting.

It’s a remarkably simple solution which I find works very well for small projects although it certainly isn’t capable of scaling. I don’t really use it for planning but more for day to day tracking of bugs and features and as such it has demonstrated to be an extremely powerful and flexible system. Take for example needing to break a task down into five sub-tasks, with traditional systems it would probably take you 5 to 10 minutes. With this system you merely press the enter key a few times in the right places. Which for small projects wins me over in terms of simplicity over big solutions or over the problems of editing paper and pen notes.

Another strong benefit of this system is it’s very easy when you start work to refresh your mind as to exactly what you’re on and when you leave to assess the progress made and make a note of what needs doing next, giving a great piece of mind. As a text editor solution it can be as ad-hoc as you want it to be and its trivial to include rough notes and then formalise them into entries at a later point.