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Thursday, August 11, 2011

A LITTLE BIT OF THIS, AND A LITTLE BIT OF THAT

Steve Cole reports:

I spent all of May and June doing projects for Origins and all of July doing things that did not get done during May and June. For August, I set myself a goal to make a lot of progress on a lot of things. I took my "things to do list" and inserted it into the bottom of the format for the MY DAY blogs. Each day, I did something (usually a page of work, say, a ship card or scenario) from the first few categories, eventually running out of day. I tried to make sure that every day included some little project that I could get done that day (thereby shortening the list and making sure something new got into the next day), as well as some projects which I could do a little of each day.

For example, the first thing on the list was the missing ships for Boosters 31-32-33. Doing one of these per day means I will be done before the middle of August and can have these ready to print with the September releases. While that killed an hour per day, eventually, they'll all get done and something else will get worked on for an hour per day. (I like working on graphics and would do that all day every day given the chance. I had to force myself to stop at one per day so that each day included something fun.)

Every day, I tried to do some work on the next Communique and the next Hailing Frequencies. It only takes a few days of doing a little per day and the next one of those is done and that item goes to the bottom of the stack for a couple of weeks.

Every day, I tried to do something on the next ePack of Federation Commander ships for e23. Sometimes that gets a lot done for a little effort (such as putting the existing ships into the file), while other days mean a lot of work for a little progress (doing a new ship card, the scenario, or the counters).

I had a lot of "one time" projects, such as the formal document to extend the contract on the Valkenburg computer game or the revision six rulebook for Romulan Attack, and tried to do one per day.

I have a lot of low-priority projects, such as updating the gazetteer, but tried to make sure one of these got onto the list for one day each week.

Every day, I did some work on Star Fleet Marines. One day that might be a playtest session, another day might be a rulebook update, and another day might be a scenario.

One of the projects I looked forward to the most was the Fed Commander Scenario Bank. I have over 50 scenario submissions on file. Some of them take five minutes of work to make publishable, others take an hour or two. It annoys me that every time I actually need a scenario I find myself with one of the hard ones. So I decided to just do one a day, easy or hard. Well, one day I did four really easy ones all from the same guy. My theory was to start with the oldest ones on file and do one from each person.

The virtue of the system is that because work being done to projects means projects being finished, and single-day projects getting done means more work on other projects.

Fed Admiral is on the list and gets higher every day, blipping the radar just now. I expect to start doing a couple of pages per day this week. I know a lot of people want that to happen, and I intend it to happen, and to happen correctly. That means I don't just throw it into the page format software without reading it, but actually make sure it fits into the Star Fleet Universe instead of just having an SFU sticker on game mechanics written for non-SFU projects.