Red Brick Games

I’m glad I’m finally working on OVM’s Artificial Intelligence. The A.I. is one of the chief reasons I wanted to write an RTS in the first place. But it’s taken me two years to get to this point! How frustrating.

Game development sometimes seems like an exercise in extreme delayed gratification. Work for a zillion years, to finally get to the part you really were interested in. Though I suppose the same can be said for software development in general. Writing code just takes a long time.

My “comprehensive” task list for OVM now has 99 remaining tasks. I seem to average about one task per working day, or just slightly better, so that gives some indication about where OVM stands schedule-wise. “Comprehensive” is in quotes of course, because new tasks still get added occasionally, but the list’s growth has slowed to about 1-2 new entries per week.

Thankfully, project management is fairly simple when you’re a one-man development house. Case in point - up til now, I’ve been maintaining Orcs vs. Martians’s task list as a WordPad document. Pretty low-tech, eh? But now I’m trying to make a roadmap of tasks to final release, and I need something a little more powerful.

So I downloaded OpenOffice. I’m putting OVM’s tasks into a spreadsheet, courtesty of “Calc”, OO’s equivalent of Microsoft Excel. The main reason I’m doing this is I want to be able to sort/view my tasks by multiple criteria. Those criteria being:

• by task category
• by task priority, i.e. how crucial is it for release
• by the order I plan to tackle the task
• by task completion

Voila’:

I figure a spreadsheet is adequate for my modest needs. I know there’s more powerful project management software out there, but it’d be overkill for me.

This is the first time I’ve used OpenOffice. My first impression of it: nice. Calc feels very much like Excel. And it supports about a bazillion file formats. I opened the “Open File” dialog, clicked on the “File type” drop down, and the list of supported types is quite huge.