Porter's World

The Fight Against Time

Organization and planning are key to the success of any project. As far as planning goes, managing your time is a big one. Over the years, I’ve found that every single game, web, or programming task I’ve ever set out to do takes significantly longer to complete than my original assumption. Even with the knowledge I’ve gained that things will take longer, I still seem to exceed the time I give myself. Poor time  management may not sound like it’s going to kill you, and it won’t (at least it shouldn’t, I can’t promise anything), but it could end up costing you thousands of dollars, especially when it comes to selling your games.

Good time management skills are definitely something you’re going to want in the flash game industry, especially if you’re new. As mentioned in my post, Being Your Own Boss, it’s incredibly hard to get started as a member of the self employed world; you better have some money saved, or excellent time management and game design skills. As someone new to the industry, you’ll find yourself looking for help more than you anticipated. Waiting for responses in forums, or looking online elsewhere for help can take a long time, a lot more than most people leave room for. In addition, you likely won’t have any contacts with sponsors, so the sales portion of the job will probably take significantly longer than someone with their foot in the door to the industry.

While on the topic of sales, let’s take a look at that bit about I mentioned about losing thousands of dollars. If you’re not working a second job, or sitting on a few thousand dollars of extra money, you may find yourself needing rent money, and soon. As great as this career path is, the time in which you’ll receive your money for a finished game is very unpredictable. Some sponsors will pay you as soon as the deal is confirmed, others will send it 30 days after they receive the final .swf. I’ve experienced the panicked emotions that arise when you’re counting the days until rent is due and frantically trying to finish a game and get it sold, it’s not a pleasant experience. The last thing you want to do is finish a game, or make a game because you need some cash; you should always be making games for fun, or it should at least be your primary concern (yes fun comes before paying rent). Sometimes games will get amazing bids within just a few days, as shown in this post on the SteamBirds earnings; other times you’ll want to give yourself a full month to find a good deal, sometimes two or three. That’s over 30 days of waiting just from the time you finish your game, and that doesn’t include waiting for payment.

Aside from giving yourself time for a proper bid to come through, you’ll also need time to accept, and be prepared for different types of deals. For instance, I’ve passed up performance based deals that would have earned me another $2,000 had I been able to afford having that money trickle in a bit slower (over the course of a few months). I was unfortunately not able to do so, and had to accept a more upfront payment at the time. If I had been prepared to accept payment at a later date, I could have had myself another couple grand, which would have been great.

It’s rather clear that there is money to be had (or lost) based on your time management skills, so it’s obvious that cracking down on those skills is essential for anyone looking to fully utilize their potential. I personally use Klok to keep track of my time management, it’s an excellent program and is incredibly easy to use; check out my review on that for more information. Hopefully with the above knowledge I can save a few of you a couple bucks, or perhaps a couple grand; feel free to buy me a drink or four if this advice saves you some cash one day.

Klok

Are you self employed? Do you find putting in the right amount of work hours hard? Do you find keeping track of those work hours hard? Never again shall you answer yes to any of the above! Infomercial tone aside, Klok is a wonderful program that will not only keep track of your hours, but help motivate you. I recently wrote an article on being your own boss, and how complicated that could be due to motivating yourself to put in a proper amount of hours; since the discovery of this program, my production has greatly increased, and my work shows as a result. Let’s take a look at what the program has to offer.

The greatest thing about Klok, is how simple it is to use. It doesn’t have a ton of added features, it doesn’t require you to save, it just does what it’s supposed to do, keep track of your work hours. To get started, you simply create a new project. All of your projects will show up on the left side of the screen in a color coded, organized list. This portion of the interface can be collapsed if you so choose, but I personally prefer to keep it open. You can double click on a project to rename it, change it’s color, and add sub projects. As far as project organization goes, that’s up to you. I personally prefer to create a main project with my name, then have a sub project for each one of my projects, such as games, website work, and so on. Within games, I have another sub project for each individual game, and within each game project, sub projects for each task pertaining to that game. In the end, it doesn’t really matter how you set things up, the functionality will be the same, it’s just a matter of preference. Once you’ve created your projects and sub projects, you’re ready to go.

Now for actually using Klok to record your hours. To start recording your work, simply click on the exact project you’re working on, such as Porter/Games/Current Game/Level Design, right click, then press work on. Klok will then start recording your work hours, it’s as simple as that. If you want to work on multiple tasks at once, simply activate them, Klok will even change it’s visual representation of your hours to show that multiple tasks were going on during that given time . To stop working, simply press the stop button, located at the top of the program. Pressing stop does seem to stop recording all your current active projects, so if you stop only one task, be sure to resume the others immediately after. You can also manually edit the hours worked on projects; you can move them around to different times, increase or decrease hours worked, and so on. Use this feature if you wish to make up for hours worked when you forgot to turn on the program, something you’ll find rather common before you make using Klok a regular habit. If you need to delete hours, simply drag and drop them into the trash can found on the bottom left side of the interface.

One of the best features of Klok, is it’s ability to display data back to the user. If you’ve organized your projects and sub projects correctly, you can get some very useful information out of Klok, in no other form than the beloved pie chart. To see these charts, simply click on Reports. You’ll instantly see a pie chart showing the data of all your top level projects. Clicking on a project within the pie chart will then update the chart showing the data for that specific project. If you’ve set up your project correctly, you can look at how many hours you’ve put into an individual project, and how much time you’ve spent on each task within that project.

Klok also has a number of added features, luckily for those who don’t want them, they’re not at all in the way. If you’re in a more work place environment, perhaps your boss requires you to log your hours worked, and what you worked on. When this is the case, bosses will generally require you to use a program such as Microsoft Excel. The developers have kept this in mind, and added a feature to instantly export your Klok data to an Excel project file. Your hours can be exported as either a weekly time sheet, or a monthly time sheet, very handy. If you’re into archiving, you can do so by simply dragging and dropping a project into the archive box at the bottom left of the program; that’s a nice plus for keeping track of previous work. The developers are also working on version 2.0 of the program, and from what I’ve read, they’re also adding in support for third party programs. For now, I suggest using the 1.5 beta, it’s far superior to the 1.0 version is stable from what I can tell. If you have any suggestions for the program, check out the developer’s forums and leave a comment.

All in all, Klok is an amazing program. It’s simple to use, the interface is clean, and it gets the job done. If you are like I was, and had issues putting in the right amount of hours, you’ll definitely find that using Klok fixes this. I’ve always wondered exactly how much money I’ve been making per hour as a flash game developer, with Klok, I’ll actually be able to figure that out accurately, and with ease. If you haven’t installed it yet, I definitely suggest doing so, it’s one of the best free programs I’ve ever come across, and I’m loving it.