dev diary: staying organized! (Patreon)

since i'm still in the thick of it scripting the rest of treat 7, i thought i'd mix it up this week and talk about some project management-type stuff i've been setting up for the past few months!

i used to live by trello boards...... i was introduced to it through my old job, and found it really useful to have a personal board for all the random things i didn't want to forget to do, plus project boards for certain games that i found hard to manage with just a google doc alone. i used these for treat 4-6 (at least i'm pretty sure treat 4 was the first one i tried this with?), and it's been most useful with syrup 2 just because there are so many stray thoughts to keep track of.

here's what that board looks like (with some spoilers censored lol)

what i'd usually end up doing is writing all my thoughts into long checklists, so the numbers on the cards don't really reflect the actual progress (because i tend to delete things as i go...)

this is the general vibe of the cards:

...kind of all over the place! lol

i liked trello because whether i was at my computer or sitting around on my phone, i could toss whatever i was thinking into the cards very easily. it was also nice after a long day of working on the game, i'd lay in bed and update my checklists, and try to organize them a little better and think of what i wanted to do next time.

the downside: navigating all these cards was a bit messy! it was hard to get an overall sense of progress from it, and i was putting a lot of info in them that turned out to be better kept in other forms (like SPREADSHEETS!!!!!! but i'll get into that some other time...)

anyway, this year i got into using NOTION! yet another tool introduced to me through my old job... it took a while for me to really get used to how it works, but now that i figured out how to use it well, i can't believe i lived without this.

this is my main page! i've been having fun making everything look nice and colorful

i have pages with all sorts of records, todo lists, story notes and outlines. i'll tell you about the wiki another time...! i'm still filling everything out, but it's so nice having everything in one place and pretty quick to navigate!!

the calendar (from the top of the post) is the thing i refer to the most--it's really helped put in perspective how much work i actually get done in a month. previously i'd always get into a rut, like "what did i even do in the past few weeks? i should've made more progress on my games!!" having a visual representation of things helps me remember, like "no, nami, you didn't have time, because you did all this other work you're not thinking about." duh!!!!

it's helped a ton to know how many days i have between the next thing i want to post, too. i've been finishing everything early so that i can relax a bit on the day it gets posted! with the way i used to share my content, i would always just post whenever it was done, or plan for it to go up the next day... now that i don't feel any pressure to share things right away, i've been able to put things out so much more consistently.

IT'S BEEN AMAZING... a real breath of fresh air compared to the past few years of working too hard, not feeling like i've done enough, and then burning out for long stretches of time. putting due dates on trello cards never worked for me, i really needed to see it laid out in a calendar to wrap my head around it, haha.

the only thing about notion is that it's a little too bulky to use for quick notes i can write from my phone--so instead of having one-off trello cards to help remind me to do something, i made a personal discord server to keep track of stuff!

normally you'd think of discord as a community thing, but having a conveniently dated little archive with different channels to post things in is really perfect for keeping notes for myself!! this is what it looks like:

just like the calendar, it's another thing that helps me remember i didn't just sit around doing nothing the past week. seeing it all written out in one place made me go "OH, i really AM super productive... what the hell???" hahaha

the current-builds channel holds all my links that i send to friends for playtesting, i post in game-updates every time i update a game (with the version number so i can see what the latest is too), and general has all my reminder-to-self type stuff (usually about emailing translators lol), and i just delete the message once i've taken care of it (or wrote it down somewhere else so it's not forgotten)

it's all about making things as convenient as possible for myself!!! when i need to check something, i know exactly where to look without thinking too hard about it (or sifting through a bunch of trello cards haha). this notion+discord combo has worked really amazingly for me!!! i feel like... finally i can keep track of everything in a way that's not overwhelming or clunky! it's a great feeling.

if you guys know other tools for this kind of stuff please feel free to share it! different things work for different types of people/projects so i'm always interested to learn more ways of doing this stuff.

thanks for reading!!