MonFree - Retrospective 2018-07-02

By Max Woerner Chase

In this post:


So, what have I learned from trying to put together a design for MonFree? Well, designing stuff is hard, which I knew. I'm well acquainted with the rabbit holes that form around specification. I just hope I get my momentum back at some point, and can look back at one of these feeling like I accomplished what I meant to, rather than merely(?) "something".

Anyway, I did end up with a much clearer picture of the directions I could take the UI, which I need to sketch out sometime.

What I think I really need for the next week I do is to make sure I have a good baseline first.

This week, I started putting together a specification of how a hypothetical monster training game would differ from the not-yet-done basic roguelike I'm sometimes working on, and came up with a list of things that have to be implemented.

Next, I started working out rough dependencies between them, to have a plan of attack for converting one to the other.

I'm not sure if it's the heat this week, or moving out of my comfort zone in terms of what to work on (if it's not obvious, I do very little design up front most of the time), or if the new schedule isn't working right, but I'm not feeling like going for another week of this. I think next week I'll try something like, I don't know, Project Euler problems in Rust. One thing pointing to external factors is that I've been kind of messing up the task of actually publishing these entries lately. Actually, maybe that's something I could do. Touch up the publishing script, because there must be some way to improve this workflow.


Next week, I want to find something a little easier, to cope with this miserable heat.