A few weeks ago (before all that turkey and stuffing, bluh) I posted about getting out there and creating a game. I spent a few minutes slapping together a little “hit the button to get points” page as a retarded example. My challenge to you was to take a few hours (24 max) and make something out of it. I got quite a few comments, trackbacks, etc. which is pretty awesome! Some brave soul actually took me up on the challenge, and here is the link to that. It is surprisingly addictive, and has inspired me to go further with the concept. But more on that later.
Today I wanted to give you a little more advice, since I seem to be so full of it lately (ha ha, I heard that – you back there with the Starbucks coffee). There are two applications that I want you to try out that will transform your work life as well as bring that dream game of yours closer to reality.
The first app is Evernote. It is basically a note-taking app on steroids that allows you to capture and search for stuff in your random day to day findings. This app works across many platforms and sync’s your notes between them. This is perfect for what I am proposing you try to do. Instead of diving down into coding on your game right away – take a few minutes every day (preferably in the mornings) and write down what you are thinking about that day. Make a list or two of the things you want to accomplish that day. Nothing official, nothing major. Just jot down a few things. Doing this in Evernote will allow you to automatically have them in chronological order, as well as completely searchable by its amazing search engine. The best part of this is that these notes can follow you wherever you go – even on your mobile phone. Get an idea for a game? Jot down a note or two on your laptop and flesh it out later on your desktop. The idea is that you begin to establish a habit of taking notes about your day, every day. Eventually you’ll discover that there was actually somthing cool you wrote about a few days ago, and that you want to recall it. Bam! It’s right there. You can even put code snippets in – although this is one place Evernote could use some improvement. You can also tag your notes, which is helpful when you want to browse around later. Another fabulous feature is the “clip screenshot” – which allows you to capture images and things into your notes. It’ll even OCR them for you for easy searching later.
The second app I want you to go get is Dropbox. Quite simply one of the most amazing apps you’ll ever have on your PC or Mac. It is a virtual drive that sync’s with their servers and any other machine that you want it to. The uses for this app are so many, however since you are creating games I want you to use this as your place to put random images, your code snippets, and even create a local GIT repository in a folder there, and it’ll sync it up with any other machines you have. It’s perfect as both a backup drive as well as additional space for things you want to keep around.
So, your homework for today (aww man!) is to go try out Evernote and Dropbox. Keep a daily notebook in there with what you are working on. Use Dropbox to store all your random game junk. Between these two apps you’ll have a mobile work environment that is very versatile and powerful.