It seems like, from my experience, that Week 2 has a bad habit of causing problems for people. This is when people drop off, sometimes never to return… :(
You're past the initial excitement of building a game, and you've began hitting your first big, nasty bugs, and you're struggling with the limits of your chosen architecture. Perhaps you've even had to refactor your architecture a time or two to allow yourself to keep moving forward. On top of that, there's still a ton of game left to make, and with some setbacks or distractions popping up (and life trying to catch up to you again) Week 2 can be pretty rough.
So the purpose of this thread is to talk about what can you do to overcome the mid-month struggles?
I'll go ahead and add a couple of thoughts of my own, but please tell us all what you're doing to survive to the finish line!
Here's my thoughts…
Cut scope ruthlessly; Aim for an MVP. In the startup world, and MVP is a Minimum Viable Product. It's the absolute minimum that you can do and still have some value to somebody. An MVP for a game would be the absolute minimum that would be entertaining to somebody.
Take a few minutes and look at whatever it is you're currently working on. If you you dropped it from the project, would people miss it? If not, it's time to switch to a different feature to work on. That's especially true if it's giving you headaches. It's not worth spending time scrubbing the baseboards in the spare bedroom if the couch in the front room still has your laundry all over it.
Pick the features that are the most useful and do them first.
If things go well, you can always revisit these "should have" or "could have" type features, after the "must haves" are complete.
And the challenge of making a game shifts dramatically after you've got that first playable MVP. There's a "complete" game there, and nobody can take that away from you. For the rest of the month, you can work on growing it from something that barely scrapes by as a minimum into something cooler and cooler every day.
Please don't take this post as me being "preachy". Week 2 has killed me in both of the other competitions… I'm posting this as much to help me motivate myself as anybody else, and I'm certain I could benefit from the things you guys are doing as well. So please do share your thoughts!