I have been working in software development for 7 years and throughout my experience in many projects, I always found that it’s easy to make good projects with good tools, it’s almost impossible to finish easy projects without good tools. Of course, there are many more variables to take into to account when trying to understand why projects go wrong but today I want to focus on tools, to be more specific project management (future reference as PM) tools related to video games. I have used many PM tools throughout my professional life, in some cases we even created the companies own PM tool but when it comes to small personal projects I rarely see other developers use PM tools at all, from personal experience I understand that planning is something that is not fun or even high priority on a creative project, the thrill of creating something new is so exciting that taking time to define what should be done really doesn’t seem that great, also it’s very hard to determine the time it is going to take to find “inspiration” or how much time should the “polish stage” be since everything works. On the other hand, I have a backlog of unfinished projects because I never defined specific objectives, share progress with anyone or even set deadlines to release to projects, if there are no plans, no compromise, there is no pressure to actually do anything, especially in small personal projects.
With my recent decision to start making games and expose information about them I also decided to start using a new PM tool I first heard about in the Manchester Unreal Meetup Group called HacknPlan. Until now I used Trello as my PM tool for personal projects, my main reasons are that it’s free, easy to use (Kanban board) and a lot of people know how to use it so it’s easy to have other people to join in and use it. It’s all great but I wanted more, a better definition of milestones, better ways of viewing my tasks, an easier rescheduling of tasks, basically anything that would make my interaction with the tool easier but it had to have all the benefits as Trello and HacknPlan offers me that, I recently had a 2 week vacation which delayed my release cycle for my ZX spectrum remake Rex, I also did a rescope of the project and determined that I need at least 1 more month to finish the game, I lost less them 10 minutes going to HacknPlan changing my milestones which I use as planned releases, I rescheduled my tasks these are mainly features or assets that I need to have for the game and also added more tasks that I thought will rescoping, I also always keep the task board updated it is a visual incentive to see the completed section grow with tasks, after all of this I now have a game plan that will guide me for the next months in order to release a new game, so go to the HacknPlan website and check it out, it won’t cost a thing and I highly recommend it.
