First of all, sorry for not posting as regularly over the past week. I made a decision to have Glo in its final releasable state at least two weeks before launch. That way I will be able to focus on promoting it and will have the time to sort out any bugs that pop up with a lot less stress. The intent was also to avoid the dreaded crunch.
The result was not a total avoidance of crunch, but a more managed version of it. To start with my definition of crunch is when you sacrifice other activities and time to above and beyond what you would normally, in order to dedicate it to task you’re are crunching on. Using that definition, I technically have been “crunching” for the past week and a half.
A couple of weeks ago I decided that I was going to ensure Glo was release ready two – three weeks before launch I was going to have to make some sacrifices. Those two sacrifices were exercise and sleep. Normally I would push myself to include exercise in my daily routine no matter what and it wasn’t that I couldn’t include that in my day whilst also achieving a large amount of game dev. The decision was that every single moment I had free (i.e. not at work and not spending time with my wife and son) I would put into finishing Glo. That meant exercise was abandoned and sleep was on average 4 – 5 hours a night. As I didn’t really spend much time doing anything else I also didn’t have as much interesting stuff to post about, hence the lack of blog updates.
The result of this focused effort is that Glo is now release ready and I have a new trailer for it (which wasn’t originally planned). I now have everything in place to start heavily promoting up to release day and also ready for the PLAY Expo this weekend. I wouldn’t normally recommend sacrificing so much, but it was for a short period of just under two weeks (any more than that I don’t think would be healthy) and it has put me in a place where I am much more relaxed for what the next two weeks has to hold.
I’m also excited to get back into moving some weights tomorrow as I get back into my routine. As the one thing that has enabled me to keep my motivation and focus for the past three months is the