The project - 100 hours completed

The first of my mini milestones has been achieved and that is hitting the 100 hour mark.

May not seem like much but my goal has been to mentally set mini goals to ensure I stick with it.

The first 100 hours have been tough. I probably haven't made it easy of myself but I started this project just a week after the birth of my second son so juggling this with a newborn has been tough. But of course that is also the motivation.

Those fragmented nights and early mornings have also been to the advantage of the project and being awake for some 20 hours in a day certainly helps. So much so that of my 936 hour target for the first year I am already about 20% ahead of schedule which is mostly due to working on it most days. Again little and often.

So what I have achieved in this first 100 hours:

• Prototyped against GameSalad
• Prototyped against Cocoa
• Prototyped against Corona SDK
• Chose to go with Corona
• Worked my way through game design theories in The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses by Jesse Snell
• Started working with Lua and Corona and found it very alien. Distinctly disliked the lack of integration in an IDE and to devices that XCode provides, for example. However, a couple of tools such as Corona Remote by Matthew Pringle as well as TextMate with the Corona plugin has made it a little more comforting
• Started my first attempts at physic and game engine logic with some success but looking pretty ugly
• Working on three game concepts and designs
• Writing blog entires (1000 page view in first month)
• Tweets (25 followers)

Phew!!! On paper, or blog, that looks quite impressive and after all that is the point of keeping a blog while on this journey to keep motivation and in the hard times see just how far I have come.

So on reflection things are going pretty well. I am ahead of schedule in terms of hours applied a day despite the new born baby and long working weeks in my 'day' job.

The focus over the coming hours, days and weeks is to apply the iterative prototyping approach that the lenses book recommended to the point I am comfortable with the tools, programming language and game concepts.