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Robert Tamayo

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Will I Finish Balloon Ghost in Time?

It was my intention to have Balloon Ghost finished by now. Instead of working on my next project during October, I'll be frantically trying to finish up a game that I had plenty of time to work on. There really isn't any excuse.

To be completely honest, it has been about 3 months since I worked on the game. Now there are 4 weeks until Halloween. It's prime Halloween Season time, but it doesn't feel like it to me. I guess that's because I didn't finish this game, and seeing anything spooky reminds me of that.

But I'm not going to give up that easily. So what am I going to do to finish this game? 

For one thing, I have to start moving fast. I'm determined to finish this game within this year's Halloween Season. That gives me a maximum of 4 weeks from today to release the game. Given that post production and app approval can take an undetermined amount of time, that cuts my design time down to 3 weeks. That's also a decent buffer before Halloween.

I think I need to finish the game within 2 weeks, and then spend a week on cleanup and polishing. So that leaves me with 2 weeks for finishing up the levels and stuff.

In order to finish a project this far behind schedule within the original timeframe, I will need to cut things out of the game. I'm not going to cut anything major out, just anything that slows me down. For example, choosing a color palette and testing all the colors together is slowing me down. So, an easy thing to cut out of the game is color. I'm going to test out black and white for this game.

Another thing to cut out is testing. I'm not going to test anything. If I make a decision, it's final. So, in the example above, I'm limiting myself to not being able to test black and white. I decided black and white once, so that's what I'm stuck with.

The purpose of limiting what I do and not allowing decisions to be changed is to speed up development. Given a few weekends until the release window, I only have 6 good days of development to finish this game. The rest of the days are weekdays, and that means I'll only have an hour or two at most.

I'm past the time of getting hung up on the details. I need to make this work, and I need it to be fast.

Time to get started.
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