Escape Room Game – Time Management

I wanted to take the time now to talk about time management and how it has impacted my game development journey. As with all classes, making sure you are spending and allocating the appropriate amount of time on a problem, feature, assignment, etc. is very important to staying on track and getting everything done. This does, however, get a little more complex when you are fully in control of your development as I am in this class.

Prior planning prevents poor performance is a good way of thinking about this. The way I have set up my sprint plans and weekly agenda is by at the beginning of each quarter knowing where I need to be. Then, I break down that whole journey into large milestones, such as completing entire individual rooms. From there I break it down into weekly tasks for each individual room. This helps to make sure that every week is given an appropriate and equal amount of work.

Lastly, I wanted to mention feature creep. Knowing how long things will take is very important because if you don’t have a good understanding of how long a feature will take you may over promise what you can accomplish. This is something that comes from experience and having completed these features before. It was certainly a challenge at first with this project because this is the first time I’ve made a game in Unreal Engine. However, another good saying that I keep in mind for this is that every plan made will usually be three times as expensive and twice as long as you anticipated so giving buffer time for yourself is very important.