Time Management

Being the producer of my game development team can sometimes be a challenge. Sometimes people don't want to work or don't feel motivated or even feel like there's to much work to be done. So when dividing work up to give to each member of a team it is important to take this into consideration. This week my programmer is working on getting our frameworks done so we can properly code. This involves a lot of changing our current code and making cuts where the code is either using outdated tech or just sloppy. I thought this would not be a very difficult task but I was very very wrong.

5 days later and now we have a framework (more or less) but there is still a lot of code running through the CPU instead of the GPU. This makes our code slow and causes our game to take almost a full minute to compile. The worst part is our game is not very big with only a few models and hardly any animations. So what to do? My programmer is still ironing out details regarding the framework and my other programming competent artists are busy modelling away and animating. So I have started optimizing our code.

I am by no stretch a good programmer so this is a bit of a challenge for me. So far I am just reading up on how to do this. Converting our old openGL code into newer openGL code and figuring out where I can send data to the GPU for faster processing. This (stating it nicely) is driving me crazy. Taking old code and making it better is by no means a fun time for me but I am doing it. Slowly but surely I am doing it.

But where did this problem start? Why am I doing the job I asked my programmer to do? Well... It's due to time management. I underestimated the amount of work it would take to get our framework up to snuff and therefore I am picking up the extra work the needs to be done. I am by no means complaining that I have to code because I do like making a game and working on it but it was poor planning on my part to put excess work on others. So from here on out I will be rethinking my work divisions for my group.

This has been a bit of a serious blog so here's a programming joke...

A guy walks into a bar and asks for 1.4 root beers.
The bartender says "I'll have to charge you extra, that's a root beer float"
The guy says "In that case, better make it a double."