I spent some time over the winter break to think about focus, and I decided to cave in.
I made this website games-only.
There’s no point, for now, for the Flaredust Studio website to cover too much ground and spread myself
So, we decided to adjust the website accordingly.
Fair enough.
I move everything web-related to my personal web blog (of which I separated from my art as well, which is now on my art blog; a lot of restructuring happened over the past couple weeks).
Doing so kind of forced me to look the beast into the eyes and acknowledge I’m trying to do a little too much and stretching myself a little too thin.
If I want to ever finish a game, I need to set up a system where working on my game is a priority.
My priorities in 2018 were “planned” a little like this:
- Our video game Project Libra
- My part-time job
- Friends and family
- Some web dev clients to pay the bills
- Art & design for maybe an online store?
But the split of my time really ended up going more like this:
- My part-time job
- Friends and family
- Web projects for clients
- [Insert some other fundamentally procrastinating activity]
MakingPlaying Video games- Some push in art during the summer and in December
- Project Libra (for a total of two updates)
Though I did not plan something concretely last year, like a schedule or deadlines, I don’t think that was the worst offender.
I let myself easily distracted. I keep myself busy with habits that aren’t productive.
So, this year, I decided to make myself a weekly and monthly goal schedule, publish it on here to keep myself accountable to occasional reader of this blog. The first goal post will be done on Monday morning and will account for both my and Sébastien’s goals.
So, uh, about 6 people for now, but it’s ok! For as long as I’m not the only one aware of those benchmarks, there’s going to have some pressure.
The other part of my plan is to do something about my distractions. Some set-up where if I’m distracted, I have some lifeline to bring me back. Most of my distractions are on my laptop, so it’s proven itself hard to focus on work when there’s all the cool stuff I could do instead.
To curb this, I decided to make myself some posters with all the leftover tasks before we can launch our game’s demo. They’re not done yet, but the goal is to put it right above where my laptop is so I can just look up whenever I’m distracted, then be back on track.
I already listed all the tasks left to do. I just need to sit down, focus and do them. One by one.
Next, I used to have a social media killer app, where between certain hours I was prohibited to go, when I was using Google Chrome. It was a flexible tool, allowing me up to 10 minutes of access to any websites in the blacklist. I blocked the usual offenders but allowed via the whitelist the developer access for most of those since they were part of my daily life tasks.
However, now that I use Firefox for privacy reasons, the choice of plugins is blunt.
I didn’t have anything installed since January, so at least there’s that now.
Finally, I noticed in December that when I used to be hyper focused while drawing and livestreaming it. The issue however is that… a lot that I have left to do for the demo includes spoilers, so I can’t stream my screen without risking ruining the game, and since it’s a visual novel, story is kind of a big deal.
I am still planning to stream while drawing (this way I don’t surf social media), but I’ll probably invite people on our discord channel instead of showing my screen and have talk about life and stuff while I draw. For now, this should do the trick. Maybe I’ll have something more fancy in the future.
So, that’s the plan. Woo!
See you on Monday for our first weekly goal schedule.