001 First Day Full-Time Indie
Updated: Jan 18, 2019
Friday 4th January, 2019
Welcome to the first blog entry in my journey as a full-time Indie Dev! I told Reddit about my plans - you can read the post here - and promised I'd get better at documenting development. So here I am!
I've never written a blog before so this could be terrible, I'm just going to write it like a diary as that's what comes easiest to me. Hopefully it's useful to at least someone out there. I'm also planning on updating this blog on a weekly basis.
Anyway, waffling done, let's get into it!
6:30am
I start my day by getting up early, immediately blowing up balloons and sticking them round the house. No, I haven’t lost the plot on day 1 (promise) – it’s my partner’s birthday! I spruce up the place, make her a cup of coffee and wake her up with some presents at 7am.
After that, I spend some time responding to more people on the Reddit post I made. I’m surprised by how much attention the post got and in a really motivated mood from all the positive responses! It takes a while to get through every reply but I had fun doing it! Time for a shower, and a bit to eat.
10am
My first time sitting at my desk in the spare room since going full-time indie, and it feels completely normal, which is amazing.
The first thing I do is open the Production Roadmap I made. This is simply a Google Sheets document that maps out what I should be doing each day. The second thing I do is open Word and start typing this blog! I promised I would get better at it, so I'm committed now!
My task for the day is to create the animations for our 3rd playable character. Ant (the Artist) submitted the game-ready model last night, so I grab them from Sourcetree, open up Blender and get to work!
After just over an hour of Dev, I have got the rig parented to the mesh and basic weight paints sorted. Time to tidy it up and get some blend shapes made for the facial expressions.
12:45pm
I’ve finished up the basic blend shapes for some simple facial anims and a bit of bounce to the hair. Time for some lunch!
2pm
Lunch break is over and it’s back to it, starting with the run animation.
5pm
And my day is done! I managed to get the run animation pretty much complete, just need to add a bit of secondary animation to the hair and the face now. Everything is prepped to finish all the animations required now though which is good. A productive first day! After some minor tweaks to the roadmap it’s time to sign off! I’m not planning to work at the weekend but will put in a few hours if it’s a quiet one.
Adios amigos!
Signed by my face
