Plan for success
The roadmap
Divide your project into smaller incremental steps, starting from the end (how you envision the final build) and working your way back to where you are. Spread those steps on a roadmap, those will be your milestones. This is called “retroplanning”.
This is a very helpful way to keep yourself on track and make sure that you can realistically do what you aim to do. If you can’t make it work on the roadmap, it's a good warning sign that the game is too big and that you need to adapt your idea to make it fit. As you progress along the weeks, keep track of your progress and if you see you’ll burst the timeline, adjust and cut stuff from your game to make it fit!
Sprints and Tasks
Each “milestone” can be considered a collection of “sprints”. A sprint is basically a slice of development time (1 week for example) where you will have to finish all the tasks you have put in it.
Therefore you will need to create what is called a “backlog” of tasks (a collection of all the tasks and bugs that will grow bigger as you move forward in the project). Each sprint, everyone gets assigned tasks that should be done during that time.
When deciding which task should be in your sprint, make sure to prioritize tasks where the most important tasks should get done right away and the less important ones later. Of course, critical bugs that prevent the build/the core loop from functioning should always take priority.
If there’s too much to do and not enough time to do it, revisit your milestones.
For a given sprint, each task needs to be assigned to at least one person on your team and that person is responsible for the completion of that task.
This helps with accountability but also allows you to establish how much work you can handle in a given sprint thus helping you understand if you can reach your end goal on time! All the while helping you track progress of your game in a very granular way.
Milestones, sprints and tasks should be available online on the support of your choice during the whole project.
