Devil in the Details; the Importance of Specificity in Development Plans

As I worked on the health controller for my project over the past week, a familiar lesson kept rearing its head- things always take more time than you expect. An obvious cause of this apparent time dilation is a general sense of optimism found in many projects- the feeling of “I can do this” that motivates us to start can also create grievous underestimations of the amounts of errors we will inevitably have to trudge through. However, this week I realized that a lack of planning specificity can also have a huge impact on the accuracy of my estimated time scope. I thought that I was being fairly detailed in my Trello board, mapping out individual steps for most necessary actions. For instance, my health controller is split into collision detection that destroys asteroids and a health counter that lowers on each hit. Yet, as I started to actually establish the controller, I realized that I still had to code a large amount of details I had vaguely accounted for, but not for which I had not really allotted appropriate time. I need an immersive way to show the player that their health is lower, such as having cracks on their “screen.” Yet, not only does that method require the creation of multiple different crack assets, but a myriad of different coded functionalities, from the instantiating itself to the time logic for any sort of quick flash of color or black between appearances. Each of these individual details takes its own set of time, especially if I do not already know how to do it. As I have noticed, this really adds up, and can quickly overwhelm the project.

Unfortunately, one can’t simply ignore these kinds of details. They are, at least important, integral to a feeling of polish or at most important, necessary for the very project to function. It would seem that the best way to deal with this is in the planning stage, but this presents its own conflict- planning every possible detail would be far too time-consuming, defeating the very purpose. Striking the right balance of detail in planning is key to accurate time budgeting. But, as with most aspects of development, doing so will likely require quite a bit of practice- and failure, first. What fun.