After regenerating all the art assets, it was time to move THE OCTOBER GAME core to a fresh app template. The game architecture had changed over the months, leaving the project with lots of cruft. Classes had unused methods, or had been superseded. Many, many obsolete variations of artwork and sounds were cluttering up the Resources folder. The AppDelegate had accumulated tons of helper functions…you get the idea.
By moving into a new Xcode project I could consolidate and toss old stuff without taking the risk of breaking the app. Getting your game into an unusable state is really terrible for morale, even temporarily. I didn’t have any experience with source control until recently, so all my exploratory development was done manually, like an animal. For instance, I’d rebuilt the audio and multitasking managers in a separate app to isolate them. Now they were tested and ready for re-integration.
This was also a chance to try out new ideas on how to be more productive. By keeping a daily running average and doing my coding earlier in the day, I essentially doubled my productivity compared to last month. I also did more fine-grained time estimation, but that was less effective. Most subtasks took twice as many steps as I predicted beforehand. Improving that is an ongoing project.
The master progress chart I started this summer is finally shrinking instead of growing. Here’s what I just got done with:
And the remaining work (as far as I can predict). The real story is in the end nodes.
Progress!