It’s time for the second post in our look at the “Top 10 rules to finish a game” (list by Dilmer Valecillos). The second rule is: Finish one task (minimum) per day.

There are three things you need in order to make a game:

momentum determination motivation

The first rule has more to do with motivation, but now we’re talking strictly about momentum. Why is it important?

Momentum is the rate at which you get things done. How fast do you make progress? Of course, there are many things that can affect the momentum. You might get stuck on some difficult issue regarding the game. Perhaps some of the team members can’t deliver what is required (again, for myriad reasons). Or maybe there’s something going on in your life and you just can’t put in the work. These are just few examples. If you ask 20 game teams why their game failed, you’ll likely get 20 different answers.

Let’s assume for a moment that you are a solo developer and your game project is going well. Let’s also assume for any number of reasons you haven’t been able to work on the game for a few days. You’ve got motivation, but soon it starts to get harder and harder to even open up the project file. You start going through in your head all the things you haven’t been able to do and how far behind the schedule you’ve fallen. You start “shoulding” yourself. You start to feel like a failure. You start resenting and resisting the project. After a while you notice it’s been two months and you haven’t touched the game project once.

What happened? Well, you lost the momentum.

Similarly, you might be in a nice situation with your project, but the further you get, the more you notice things that need to be finished. A massive list of task in your head keeps growing and instead of working on any of them, you just sit around and try to figure out solutions to them. You are getting overwhelmed.

You lost the momentum.

How do you get the momentum back? How you do prevent yourself from losing it? Project management tools (like Trello, for one) can be of great help. But the biggest secret is this. Finish one task per day.

If you work on your project every day, no matter what, then you can’t stop. The rock keeps rolling. I’m not even talking about massive tasks like “finish the collision detection today”. You can do any task. Here are some examples:

TASK: Draw a rock sprite.

TASK: Name the three NPC characters.

TASK: Change the header on the website.

TASK: Change the jump height.

Naturally, some systems in the game require more work than others. But if you save these trivial tasks for days when you have more going on, you can still get something done in the middle of everything.

And once you start working on something small, you might soon realize that you’ve worked on the project for three hours and done all sorts of things.

If you are completely stagnant, you can’t expect to just jump in and start working on full speed. Just like if you jump on a bicycle and try to start paddling on gear 21, it’s going to be incredibly difficult.

Start small! Start easy. Gradually build up that momentum, until you are unstoppable again.