Programming : My Motivation Plan

So lets keep it real here: most of the goals and projects we set for ourselves get left in the dust very shortly after setting them don't they? As mentioned a few times in my announcement post  I've experienced a lot of DOA or cancelled game related projects.

How the hell do you actually set a goal, stick to it, and finish it?

I dare say I think I actually know how to do this and that is part of what I intend to write about here to help myself and you. I have managed over the years to complete several year or longer projects to completion.

You see I believe part of the answer lies in setting very small manageable goals.



So the first thing I did was decide what I wanted to make and then wrote out and action plan for what I would need to learn to get it done.

I have a lot of really great high end 3D Skills but I decided to pick a very simple 2D 'gem' game your basic "match 3" clone ; something like Bejeweled.  I knew I fully lacked the knowledge to determine whether this was in fact a reasonable goal -- but it's the simplest game I could think of that I wanted to try and make.

So I said I'm going to make a very simple 'match 3' game and then I sat down and made a list what I would need to accomplish and learn to get that game done:

This is that list

1. Array  8x8  array to hold gem values.  
2. A schema by which to store gem values 
3. A "function or routine" (maybe not the right word) to evaluate if there is 3 in a row or more and destroy the gems if its true.
4. A function to determine the player has 'selected' a gem and chosen to move it to a nearby cell.  This would then swap the values of cell A and Cell B but only permit this swap if it aligned a 3 in a row combo or more.
5. A function to determine if any 'moves' are left - in other words is it possible anywhere on the board to swap 2 gems and result in a 3 in a row combination? If not print Game Over.
6. A method to keep track of scoreing / high scores / game mode high scores etc.
7. A method to keep track of 'levels' for progessive game play.
8. A method to keep track of 'bonuses' for more than 3 in a row combo's.
9. Matching gem code
10. Mouse Clicking / Swapping Code

 Having had picked DarkBasic Pro I found a set of tutorials to get started and began completing one of these tutorials per night roughly 4 nights a week: http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=99497&b=10

One thing I can say about the tutorials is that I took each of them "to the extreme" of my limited knowledge.  I'm not a disenchanted high school student trying to minimize my way through a  perceived useless class - I'm a highly motivated person with goals that I really do want to achieve.

And that is more important than I can begin to explain. If you do not want to do something; odds are you will  find a way not to, or to do it as poorly as possible to satisfy whomever is forcing you to do it right? Sort of like the example of high school above; kids don't really understand why they need to learn about prepositional phrases and therefore put minimal effort into it.

So when doing a tutorial that says "oh make a thing that says Hello World!"  I made the font bigger, I made it smaller, I wrapped it around to different places on the screen.

I did everything I could to learn - not just place a check mark on it as if my attitude was: "okay I did that, what now?" In fact with every single tutorial I did I said to myself .. "how would this be used in a bigger way?" or "how could I use this to meet one of my stated goals above?"

And funny enough after a month of tutorials I was able to meet my first goal of making an 8x8 array to hold gem values. (See ArrayTest3 screenshot.)

If you drew a checkerboard out on graph paper and filled each blank square with a random number between 1 and 7 you might have something like I came up with in my example here. This output is exactly what I needed to meet goal 1.

The goal was small enough that I was able to complete it in about 1 month. I went from clueless, to a simple grid of random numbers but this was the first success that I needed to feel like I legitimately had a chance to succeed in my larger project goal.

I was perhaps lucky in my inexperience to set a goal that was small enough to produce results in that amount of time I'll admit.  But had I over done it- I would simply have chopped my goal into smaller pieces.

A task of 100 puzzles is an awefull lot to tackle, enough that most people wont even know where to start.

But split that task into 10 subtasks, and now you only have a list of 10 puzzles.  Most of us can make a pick out of 10 choices. If not , slice it up in to groups of 3 or 4 and then choose.

And that is the moral of this story - pick small reasonable goals to produce measurable successes to motivate yourself further on your journey.