Project Management for disorganised people

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There’s a certain kind of person (I have been lucky over the years to have worked with many very talented examples) who has a very structured approach to starting a new project. They might start with something like high level goals and proceed logically from there to task decomposition, dependency analysis, and the application of a whole host of internally consistent, repeatable  techniques for considering the task from every possible angle to ensure there are no gaps. They then refresh on a regular basis to see if everything is coming along as planned.

My brain doesn’t really work that way. My process usually starts with “Huh, wouldn’t it be cool if..?”, assembling every scrap of information I can about whatever it is, jotting down insights as they occur and then staring vacantly into space 90 minutes later when the flow state ends and I try to make some sense of it all. This always leaves me feeling that there must be something that was missed, but after 15 or so years of seeing this play out in the workforce, I’ve come to the conclusion that no, it really does end up in exactly the same place as if I’d forced myself to start from first principles. The mind doesn’t really seem to care whether we use System 1 or System 2 thinking to encode and retrieve information, and once information has been assembled into a logical sequence, it may not matter when using it later whether that sequence was arrived at intuitively or in a series of top-down logical steps.

The strength of the intuitive process is that it’s fast and good for making decisions quickly. Where I think it suffers is in the follow-up; I find it actively painful to look at a list of things and ask myself, line by line, “where are we with this?” (this is why my wife project manages holidays).

All of which is to say, I’ve got some unformed ideas on where to start, what I’ll need and where the gaps are, but this isn’t going to be very pretty just yet.

What I know

·         Common features of games I’ve enjoyed (mostly RPGs, strategy games and the importance of the random sadism of the failure elements in roguelikes and soulslikes)

·         UIs that I like and those that incite rage and property damage

·         How to properly budget an individual game (in terms of upfront costs, realistic projections for indie dev sales-over-time and consequent ROI)

·         Legal and accounting aspects of setting up a business

·         General overview of IP law that’s a few years out of date and not all that helpful for software specifically

·         30+ years of concepts for games I know I would enjoy if someone else made them, with one very specific and simple concept I think will make a simple, fun project

·         Everything takes twice as long as you think it will, and then twice as long again

·         Not terrible at math maybe?

What I don’t know

·         Fundamentals of computer science, data architecture and so on

·         Will I find coding easy, hard or in-between?

·         How much art will cost and where to source good artists

·         How do you do all the fiddly bits – installer packages, sound and graphics driver support, load-and-save mechanics

·         IP considerations: details of how code is protected, implications for reusability of code for learning via courses, textbooks and examples from GitHub. Intuitively, basic stuff like how to make a save game, make a graphics driver work and code a menu screen can’t be guild secrets but it will be helpful to know how this actually works in detail fairly early on

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