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 Features
Indie Postmortem: 'FishEd'
 4. Time Management
With any part-time endeavor, discipline, determination, and stamina are three vital ingredients, and what started off as a fun hobby project quickly turned into something much more serious. Though there was no shortage of ideas and the willingness to implement them, the simple fact remained that there are only 24 hours in a day, and many of those were often spent working on other projects to pay the bills.
In 2005 I relocated from the UK to Canada, and as a result the project schedule lost approximately 6 months over the course of development, pushing the release date back even further than originally intended (in retrospect some of the lost time would have been particularly useful for in-depth testing and addressing bugs).
'FishEd'
DEVELOPER:
Andy Roberts, Scary Fish Ltd.
CONTRIBUTORS:
Paul Maskelyne,
Mark Hennessey-Barrett,
Paul Snart, Stoo Cambridge
BUDGET:
Approximately £2,000
LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT CYCLE:
Two years
PROJECT LENGTH:
20,200 lines of code
RELEASE DATE:
August 1st, 2006
TARGET PLATFORM:
Windows
DEVELOPMENT WORKSTATIONS:
2.5Ghz PC / Win2k,
1.5Ghz Laptop / WinXP
DEVELOPMENT TOOLS:
Blitz+, PhotoShop,
PX Binary Viewer,
Nullsoft Install System,
Axialis Icon Workshop
5. Documentation
I’d never really understood why companies hired dedicated Technical Writers until I actually had to sit down and create the program documentation. After almost three weeks and two rewrites, the answer soon became clear: writing documentation that is functional, informative, and accessible for users of any proficiency, is an extremely specialized task, and a world apart from the manuals which accompany games.
The first draft was an extremely basic overview accompanied by various menu and GUI details, and was naturally often lacking when it came to fine detail. I took great pains to sift through the documentation for countless other applications. My end result was a hybrid of various techniques and structures which seemed to stand out and work well, but the end result took far longer than the weekend I had originally (and rather naively) penciled-in.
Conclusion
FishEd was finally released on August 1st 2006, almost two years since its initial inception. It had always been a dream of mine to create something from scratch entirely on my own, taking a paper design right through to a finished product. Despite my videogame industry experience, nothing could have prepared me for writing a fully-fledged application, and it’s painfully clear to me now why companies need dedicated Tools Programmers.
While those who helped along the way are modest about their involvement, I was very fortunate to find the right help just when I needed it, even if it entailed collaring someone via Instant Messenger at 2am to ask about obscure graphics problems. Working alone is one thing, being receptive to outside help is entirely another.
As far as the future is concerned, I'll be re-writing FishEd in Blitz Max, which will also allow Macintosh owners to use the program for their projects. I'll also be integrating Level Editors and Enemy Editors into the package, opening up the scope of the program even further. I’ll be sure to re-read this Postmortem before I start…
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