![]() ![]() Until then, see you in the next update!Īnd we’re back with the next riveting installment of The Graphics of Lemonade Stand! Today I’m going to talk about a major issue I came across while creating the art and levels of my little lemonade game, that being losing sight of the art style I wanted to capture. While development of Lemonade Stand is currently complete, I will be putting blog post updates on hiatus, though there are a few areas of Lemonade Stand development I may return here to expand upon later. The sense of achievement and progress by physically crossing out each task, and seeing everything you have crossed out helps motivation too, and you can imagine the immense satisfaction from erasing the whiteboard. I think doing this helps you get a sense of real progress while simultaneously ensuring you will never be at a loss for what to work on next. At most I’ll take it month by month, and establish not only tasks that I am going to complete today or better yet, right now, but also the longer term goals and checkpoints. In the future I will be doing pretty much exactly this for all of my projects. On release day, with everything crossed out, I finally erased it. Over the course of the two weeks every task I completed was on the whiteboard, and some new ones were added. Once I completed a task, I didn’t erase it, I crossed it out. Under sound effects I wrote for what actions I wanted a sound for, under achievements I included implementing detection and rewards and adding the menu screen separately. Under designing the UI I wrote every single menu screen I would have to design and code. It contained all the above bullet points almost word for word, but it also further broke down the tasks. On the whiteboard, I wrote a list of everything I had to do in the game for it to be done. I have a whiteboard hanging above my desk. However, I didn’t just keep this idea of finally completing the game hovering in my mind for motivation. For the 2 weeks leading up to release I had a very clear goal of actually finishing the game, it was very tangible and felt very possible. I think something that would help immensely is establishing goals. For all my future projects, I will remember this experience and hopefully use it to be more motivated to do things with purpose and focus. And the game would have been finished that much sooner. Implement donations through In App Purchasesįor those 2 weeks of actually working on the game I realized, I really could have done this at almost any time in the last year.All the things I did leading up to release included: For maybe a little more than 2 weeks I worked on the game almost constantly, and in that time I made as much progress as I had in maybe the previous year. I made a conscious decision that this was it, this was the last stretch of development. Ultimately the reason Lemonade Stand was only ever released was because in the month preceding its initial launch date, I decided I was going to finish the game. There were instances of time stretches up to 3 months long with no progress being made. Lots of that is also due to lack of time management and scheduling, something I have learned a lot about over the course of this project. Lots of that is due to having a somewhat busy school schedule and other projects eating up lots of time. From the day I started it ended up taking roughly 18 months. I had started development with the intention of finishing in 6 months. A business simulator would be the most complex thing I had programmed up to that point, involving lots of AI acting independently in a system, and yet the classic Lemonade Stand games seemed simple and manageable. The idea of lemonade stand seemingly fulfilled both of those goals. I had wanted a project that was small enough in scale that I could actually finish it, but at the same time I wanted to test myself, to push the boundaries of what I was capable doing as a single developer. I have talked about this before, but my original goals for Lemonade Stand were something of a paradox, in direct opposition to each other. ![]() Most of it talks about the scope of your project, and most of it says to keep it small. There is tons of advice to be found online for what to do to make your first game. Lemonade Stand has actually been finished. The game has been released, and all of the subsequent bug fixes and patches have been rolled out.
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