I'm back, and I win!

So you've noted a lack of updates I'm sure.

I had good reason.  You see I was nearing the end of my first game project Pirates Treasure and things were getting harder and harder!

It was becoming easier to spend time doing anything else other than finish my game because all the remaining items were incredibly hard - week long impossible problems that I barely knew how to tackle!



But I decided to start cutting out distractions and I'm sorry: yes blogging went out the window!

More after the break ...



So cutting out distractions did help but nothing works like working on your project!



I seriously had to buckle down and start making half page or so attack plans on how to finish each item on my list.


My biggest problem was my bug list.  I had not been honest with myself and I only had about 8 bugs on it.

I was talking with a friend at work and each time he said "oh look this didn't do something" I'd respond "Oh yeah that's a bug I know about ..."  and after 2 minutes of chatting like this he said "I thought you only had a couple of bugs left??"


"We'll yeah .... "  so that evening I got home and sat down and wrote them ALL out and I now had 25 bugs on my list including some show stoppers!


There's not many more demoralizing things than to be telling everyone your "almost done" for a month and then finally get the slap in your face that your only "almost done" with a bug-ridden piece of crap that's going to stick out like a sore thumb!


I hate to say it - but my day job is tech support for a software company!  I bitch every day about bugs, and how some bugs would be "so easy to fix if some developer would spend 10 minutes on this crap!" .   Yeah! Those bastards!


Oh wait, now I'm the bastard.  How did that happen?


Right now is not the time to detail all those bugs to you - I may go through some post mortem posts that detail interesting things .. even though technically I guess that's what I'm doing now right? But today's topic is about finishing, winning, wrapping it up and what the final push was.


But let's stay on some kind of track here.

So maybe I'm a rookie, inexperienced, a  rube, and a noob programmer. But I decided right then that evening that I was going to fix all these freak'ing bugs.

In doing so I learned something very valuable.  I no longer understood some parts of my program that I had written two months ago!

 I don't mean to say they were so foreign I couldn't figure them out of course, I just mean I could no longer look at every single line and say "this does this, this does that".

What makes this even more perversely ironic is I had been very proud of how extensive my commenting had been in the program!  I swore to myself that I was not going to be the guy with un-commented code that I wouldn't understand a few years later, and here I was a month later and I didn't fully understand it! FRACK!


Thankfully though - I had commented about half of it - this half was enough to figure out another twenty five percent and comment that out. Finally a little bit of experimentation - taking things in and out to see 'what happens', and just clearing out 'everything extraneous' out of some sections I was able to wrap my head around it finally and start fixing things.


Wait - I thought I had a point here? Oh yes - I learned something. ( See what I did there - I took long enough to make my point that now I have to get back to the meaning of it all) and THAT is what I learned about my program and bugs.  If you see a freak'in bug while your doing something - while your head is 100% in the code. Then fix the god damn bug right then!


There are going to be plenty of bugs to fix later, trust me on this:  fix the bugs as you write them and your pain will be exponentially smaller.

So I did fix all my bugs.

And then I knew technically that I was done. But made a decision to take 1 week to do another pass on the game to polish little details as well as another week past that to to just let it breathe.  Let the thing sit there and if after a week I can't figure out anything to change - well then its done!


In retrospect this was a brilliant plan. The week of polish really paid off. Lots of little things had been 'good enough' at the time but spending a week on fixing all those small things made them shine. Sounds improved, graphics improved, the UI improved. I even polished some code to make a few things work 'better' even though they weren't broken.


And then I sat on it for a week. I showed it to some friends for my final beta and was glad to not have them point out any bugs.


And so .. I finally join what I suspect is probably a very small club:  I'm one of the few people who has made an entire game from start to finish by myself and actually finished it.

It feels really, really good, and I hope you have the experience yourself some day.

I'm euphoric right now. It doesn't get much better than this.

I haven't sold a single copy, but I feel great.

 I sent the game off to one publisher this week - just want to get an initial reaction before I sent it out to others.

Wish me luck!