01-06-2016, 08:53 PM
Hey man, great stuff. I'm keen to see you develop this thread into something like a development journal for your adaptation project. If you follow through it would be a great resource for people to see!
To answer some of your questions on the SMART goals: The way you presented them on youtube was lumping up all the whole thing by splitting it up with the smart criteria, but I think that defeats the true power of the smart system, which works best on simply stated and specific goals. So you need to start big and break it down into the components.
I think if you start with the overarching goal, like I concocted, you can begin to look at each major area that you will need to work on first (translation, art, music etc) and create overall smart goals for each of those. Then within those, you can create smart goals for the bits within the greater areas.
So at first your translation goal was good. Translate at least one act a month. For the art you could look at your characters and say, you want to create maybe 1 character concept a week, which will get you halfway, and then for the next 12 weeks do sprites/animation for 1 character every week. Same for the backgrounds...you would have to do 1-2 a week, if you want to hit 20-40, by June.
In terms of programming and software learning, you might want to dedicate a bit of time each week to also get up to speed if you are new to it, creating placeholders as you go. So these are the things you should set your smart goals for, because they will really keep you on the ball. Even without knowing details, by thinking of them in the smart way, we are already getting a sense of how much work on a weekly (even daily) basis might be needed. Good to know up front!
The key thing is really going to involve listing out all the tasks, estimating the timeframes required and then seeing what the dependencies are between them and identifying the highest priority tasks, which ones can't go ahead before others are completed. Timeframes and milestone dates for delivery of the various things. This is really just bread and butter project management. For example, perhaps you can't really start the programming until you have the translation/adaptation complete (this will depend on the project of course). With your dependencies mapped out you will also be able to prioritise the most important things first. Another example is that perhaps the characters don't all come in at the first act, so you could prioritise the ones that might be needed first.
You can of course slice things many different ways depending on your preferences. So perhaps you can do a "proof of concept" mini project, where you do the whole thing for one act only first. So the translation, the characters, the backgrounds, even music, the programming, because that will get you a really good idea of everything within the first month or so. You will have come across most of the problems you are likely to see over the whole process, and also have experience of the actual time required. After that it will just be repeating but on a larger scale. The nice thing about this approach is that you will have something to show up front, and if this was a normal marketing type thing it would make a great teaser; you know something that you might see in a kickstarter for example. This is up to what you think will work best of course.
I also HIGHLY recommend you create a physical board that you can see in your workspace with the stuff all mapped out, use colour codes, little stickers, whatever to make it look like a fun little adventure game. Also important is that "ticking off" as you complete tasks process. It's a little positive reinforcement that will help you feel good about your progress. Not the same if it's just in your head. An app I use for my daily taks is Todoist which is really simple and user friendly, and gives you some progress goals, and good "karma" points if you hit the deadlines, and lowers it if you slack off.
So yeah, I'm keen to see what you come up with. Better get cracking, July ain't that far away and there's a lot of fun to be had!
To answer some of your questions on the SMART goals: The way you presented them on youtube was lumping up all the whole thing by splitting it up with the smart criteria, but I think that defeats the true power of the smart system, which works best on simply stated and specific goals. So you need to start big and break it down into the components.
I think if you start with the overarching goal, like I concocted, you can begin to look at each major area that you will need to work on first (translation, art, music etc) and create overall smart goals for each of those. Then within those, you can create smart goals for the bits within the greater areas.
So at first your translation goal was good. Translate at least one act a month. For the art you could look at your characters and say, you want to create maybe 1 character concept a week, which will get you halfway, and then for the next 12 weeks do sprites/animation for 1 character every week. Same for the backgrounds...you would have to do 1-2 a week, if you want to hit 20-40, by June.
In terms of programming and software learning, you might want to dedicate a bit of time each week to also get up to speed if you are new to it, creating placeholders as you go. So these are the things you should set your smart goals for, because they will really keep you on the ball. Even without knowing details, by thinking of them in the smart way, we are already getting a sense of how much work on a weekly (even daily) basis might be needed. Good to know up front!
The key thing is really going to involve listing out all the tasks, estimating the timeframes required and then seeing what the dependencies are between them and identifying the highest priority tasks, which ones can't go ahead before others are completed. Timeframes and milestone dates for delivery of the various things. This is really just bread and butter project management. For example, perhaps you can't really start the programming until you have the translation/adaptation complete (this will depend on the project of course). With your dependencies mapped out you will also be able to prioritise the most important things first. Another example is that perhaps the characters don't all come in at the first act, so you could prioritise the ones that might be needed first.
You can of course slice things many different ways depending on your preferences. So perhaps you can do a "proof of concept" mini project, where you do the whole thing for one act only first. So the translation, the characters, the backgrounds, even music, the programming, because that will get you a really good idea of everything within the first month or so. You will have come across most of the problems you are likely to see over the whole process, and also have experience of the actual time required. After that it will just be repeating but on a larger scale. The nice thing about this approach is that you will have something to show up front, and if this was a normal marketing type thing it would make a great teaser; you know something that you might see in a kickstarter for example. This is up to what you think will work best of course.
I also HIGHLY recommend you create a physical board that you can see in your workspace with the stuff all mapped out, use colour codes, little stickers, whatever to make it look like a fun little adventure game. Also important is that "ticking off" as you complete tasks process. It's a little positive reinforcement that will help you feel good about your progress. Not the same if it's just in your head. An app I use for my daily taks is Todoist which is really simple and user friendly, and gives you some progress goals, and good "karma" points if you hit the deadlines, and lowers it if you slack off.
So yeah, I'm keen to see what you come up with. Better get cracking, July ain't that far away and there's a lot of fun to be had!