Kickoff Event Saturday

Kickoff Event Saturday

rbwhitaker 04 Feb 2014 13:35

So I was thinking it might be fun to organize a kickoff event of sorts. Obviously, with people being scattered all across the world, it is going to be impossible to organize anything in person, so I think the appropriate place is in the IRC channel/chat room.

A couple of months ago, when we tried to organize the video/screencast thing for Mercurial tutorials, I think the time we came up with that worked best was 17:00 UTC+0 (Greenwich Mean Time), because it was afternoon and evening for most of Europe, it would be early afternoon for South America, and late morning for most of the United States. (17:00 UTC is 12:00 EST and 9:00 PST.) It's quite early if you're in Japan, and a terrible time if you're in China, etc. But to my knowledge so far, everyone is in Europe, the US, or South America.

(If this time doesn't work for you, we can schedule another event exactly 12 hours off of that as well. That should cover everybody. Just say the word!)

Here is a site that you can use to figure out what a specific time in UTC means in your local time zone: http://www.worldtimeserver.com/convert_time_in_UTC.aspx?y=2014&mo=2&d=8&h=17&mn=0.

I actually think that site is smart enough to pick up your local time zone, based on your IP address.

If anybody wants help double checking their math, leave a comment here, or send me a PM or an email, and I'd be more than happy to double check things for you.

I think we can schedule the event for maybe 2 hours (17:00 UTC to 19:00 UTC). People can come and go as they please, or stick around long after the kickoff event.

I know, that's actually Day #2, but seeing as how it's a Saturday, I think more people will be available.

Re: Kickoff Event Saturday

rbwhitaker 04 Feb 2014 13:46

As far as what we might do during the kickoff event, I'm open to suggestions.

For NaNoWriMo (novel writing), one thing that really helped was doing word wars, and I think we could do a similar thing with code. In a nutshell, what we would do is pick an amount of time to write/code for, along the lines of 10 to 30 minutes. Usually the chat room got pretty quiet during that time, as everyone was working away. When the time ended, we would all report the number of words that we had written. For our game dev thing, perhaps that translates into lines of code. In theory, the one with the most "wins", but the real goal of the code war would be to just get you to focus for x minutes and work on your game. After a short break (3-5 minutes) you can start all over again.

I know lines of code is not the best measurement of how much work you've done. In many cases, good code structure/design takes fewer lines than bad code. Sometimes, doing some refactoring of your code will greatly reduce the number of lines of code that you have. And of course, there will be other times during this event that you'll spend creating art, looking up information on the Internet, or designing something on paper. Those are, of course, all perfectly legitimate activities, and I don't mean to discredit any of them.

But lines of code are a simple (if not all that effective or useful) metric for figuring out how much code you're writing, and I think it is a fairly useful one in a situation where it's all mostly just for fun.

(I'm open to other metrics, but I don't think we'll come up with one that is as easy to calculate while still having some sort of relevance to getting work done.)

Re: Kickoff Event Saturday

rbwhitaker 04 Feb 2014 13:53

In addition to that, I think the kickoff event (and the chat room as a whole) will serve as a good way to sort of get to know the other people doing this competition with you and to see what ideas other people have for their games, etc.

Also, when things get tough, I think it will be nice to jump in to the chat room and talk with other people who are going through a similar experience as you. Perhaps they can help re-motivate you when you get hung up or frustrated after four hours of trying to track down one stupid bug!

Re: Kickoff Event Saturday

Swatacular 04 Feb 2014 20:04

wait.. so are you saying that during Saturday we will have short coding "contests" (not really.. but basically)?

If so, how long would they go for? and it sounds like a plan!!!

Re: Kickoff Event Saturday

rbwhitaker 04 Feb 2014 20:13

Yeah, that's essentially the idea, assuming people are up for it. The way this worked in NaNo was somebody would set up a "word war" and pick a length of time, usually between 5 minutes and 30 minutes. (But I did see a couple that were 1 minute, and a couple that were 60 minutes.) In NaNo, there was a chat bot on the IRC channel that would actually post the time remaining every five minutes, and count down for the last few seconds. It was nice that it was automated. It would take too long at this point to set up a code war bot, but maybe the next time we do a competition like this.

We then would all report how many lines of code we wrote. (In NaNo it was words.) Before I had experienced it, I had assumed somebody would then say, "I'm the winner! I had 587 words, and you only had 411!" but that never happened in NaNo. (Not that I'd be opposed to that happening for us.) People just posted their word count and move on. The purpose is, once again, more about focusing really hard to get something done for a few minutes, and cutting out the distractions, rather than declaring official winners. (Yes, even chatting in the chat room can be a distraction.)

It would really just be a friendly way to get all of us to push forward with game creation, instead of… well.. whatever else we'd be doing instead.

Again, a very informal and very optional thing. Just a friendly way to drive development for all of us forward.

Last edited on 04 Feb 2014 20:14 by rbwhitaker Show more

Re: Kickoff Event Saturday

Gabriel_B 04 Feb 2014 20:30

This does sound like a plan. Not sure I'll be able to make it, bu I'm here to claim my interest.

Re: Kickoff Event Saturday

Marcus42 05 Feb 2014 03:10

Hmm. This isn't a bad idea, but I probably won't be participating. I might be, but I dunno. I'd rather be coding at my own speed than trying to crank out as many lines of code as I can, even though I don't actually have to. I'll definitely still be visiting the IRC channel, though.

Re: Kickoff Event Saturday

rbwhitaker 05 Feb 2014 03:33

Fair enough. At this point, I'm honestly not sure how well that plan will even work, but I think it might be worth a try. Perhaps there's some variation on the idea that would be more interesting and not just drive lots of lines of code. Either way, yes, you should definitely come into the IRC channel!