Devlog #13 - Management

Hey there, it's time for another devlog!
This time I'll focus on a topic that's not really the main focus of either of us here at BL+ but it has to be done anyway: Management!

Since we are only two people we don't have a dedicated manager, but to be fair having one also isn't as necessary as it is in a bigger team.

Aside from //TODO: today we have already worked on a few other projects together so when we started with this project we already had experience with how either of us functions in stressful situations or what some of our strengths and weaknesses are.
I'd also say that we developed a good amount of trust that tasks that need to be finished, will be finished and that the end result will be of good quality.
That said, I suppose we sometimes put quality over finishing tasks in time, but we're working on getting better at planning around that...

Anyway, since this is a fairly specific situation this won't be a post about how small teams should be managed and rather an insight into how we are managing our work and what we found helpful to our particular situation.

The tool of our choice to write our schedules and keep track of pretty much all other important information is Nuclino.
This is a free and fairly simple online tool that's kind of like a lightweight combination of Google Docs and Atlassian Confluence, which obviously means that it lacks some of their features but it has everything we need and personally I like using bloat-free software.
It also gives you quite a bit of freedom on how to organize things.

In general we use Nuclino for two things: Keeping track of our schedule and writing down information about the story, the characters, or any other information we want to keep somewhere we both have access to.
In the past we also worked with shared folders in Google Drive and Google Docs but while we still use Google Drive for file exchange, having all other information at one place is really convenient and one of the main reasons we switched to Nuclino.

For the most part we schedule our tasks ourselves. We establish dates for milestones in conversations and work on a rough schedule together but anything more detailed than that is scheduled by whoever will have to actually do the work in the end.
In practice this means that we have one main schedule where we plan the rough work for every week but in some cases we also make more detailed plans or asset lists for ourselves.

When it comes to the actual game files, we use Git for version control since it's simpler to set up than SVN or Perforce and we don't really use any fancy features other than committing our changes and pushing them to the remote server anyway :'D
Source files are generally stored locally unless our work overlaps and it makes sense for the other person to have access to a .psd or any other source file.

As of now we work six days a week. Well kind of... Saturdays are sort of optional in the sense that we usually work from home then and schedule them depending on how well we're doing with our work otherwise.
Working at the same location on the other days is really helpful for communication though.
Usually while working, things come up that you didn't think of during planning and being able to just talk about it makes it a lot easier to quickly make changes or give feedback.

We don't have strictly defined working hours and even if we have established certain times when we should be at work, we stay a bit flexible with them.
Still, both of us have a sense of responsibility to actually get work done every day so in general work days are at least 8 hours long.

Taking breaks is of course important but as with most other things, it's up to each of us when we will take them or for how long. Sometimes that means that you work two hours straight without taking a break or spend an hour doing something completely different but more important than following strictly planned breaks is that we work comfortably, get things done when we are productive, and make up for it later when we're not.
Also, on the topic of breaks: while we don't follow guidelines like taking a 5 minute break every 25 minutes, there were periods of time where we followed our own take on the concept and named it "Otome Pomodoro" (thanks Mystic Messenger~).

All in all our management isn't the strictest since we have nobody on the team whose job it is to enforce our plan but for the most part I'd say we are both motivated enough that this isn't as much of a problem as it could be in other team constellations.

And this is pretty much everything important there is to say about our management.

This week's devlog is a bit shorter than usual but I hope you could take something from it.
As always, thanks for reading and we'll be back next week!