Gamedev book – day 0

I am thrilled to say that today I’ve started writing my book about game development! Every great (and huge) journey starts with a single step, which probably is the hardest one. This book is one of my new year’s resolutions for 2013.

I’ve been planning to start this book since the beginning of the year, but university work (and some side projects, such as 1GAM) swamped me with tasks. I knew there was no easy way to start this book, so I reserved 20% of my week to work exclusively on it. My workmate Denio and I made a pact to progress a personal side-project during a specific day of the week. We chose Friday for that and named it “Insane Friday” (sounds much better in Portuguese).

Sharing a common day to work on our projects is great because it helps us focus on the job, even though we are working on completely different things. No matter how much university work we need to overcome during Friday, we must progress with our projects, that’s the rule. I know 20% (a single day of the week) is not the perfect amount of time to finish a book, but I need to start with a healthy pace. The idea is to (hopefully) increase that amount over time, but smoothly.

During my first day of work, I did the obvious: planned the content. I brainstormed all the subjects I want to cover, then I wrote them down on a draft summary. Our first Insane Friday just lasted for a couple of hours, so I was not able to make my draft become a real summary, but that’s already a start.

I am looking forward to working on my book again. I will blog every week about my progress, so I can keep track of the time and measure how many centuries it will take me to finish this book :D.