Dev Log: Graphical timeline organization tool (otherwise known as a Calendar)
Hello. It’s already the beginning of the new week. Something exciting happened this past weekend, but if you missed it, here’s a new announcement.
Your Dry Delight has been released on itch.io, Steam, and Google Play!
It’s free and the GUI is optimized for mobile, so quick, go and play it before our next game announcement drops.
Can’t remember what the game is? Here’s a handy 35 second video.
Alright, now on to the actual post for the day.
tl;dr Calendars are useful, don’t put everything into a Spreadsheet
Today, we’re talking about a beautiful invention, the Calendar. Many of you probably know what a calendar is, and we did as well, but it isn’t until recently that we began using it properly. Here’s a glimpse of what our calendar looks like now.
If you look closely, you’ll see some events that occur weekly, as well as some Patreon events that have a week-long duration. Calendar usage probably looks fairly typical of most calendars, but for a long while, we were not using this calendar. Instead, we were writing up everything in a....spreadsheet.
Let’s take a trip back a couple months to around the Chess of Blades Kickstarter (one of these days, we’ll make a dev log post about running a Kickstarter campaign). Both before and during the Kickstarter, we have to make sure to push regular updates to increase audience interest and get the word out. What better way to plan this than in a spreadsheet, right?
Something to that effect. The actual spreadsheet calendar was lost in a file migration, so this was just cobbled back up for the post. As we were manually typing up dates and repeat events, we thought to ourselves: hmm, sure would be nice if there was some easy way to visualize this. So gamma set about drawing up a nice little timeline.
(Again, recreated for purposes of this post.) Not exactly very practical, and time that could be spent elsewhere is spent redesigning the presentation of information.
Finally, we rediscovered the Calendar whilst searching for Twitter scheduling tools. If we add certain events to the calendar, the tool will send a corresponding Tweet when the event begins! And we can do something similar with To-Do tasks!
As a result, we now have a nicely populated calendar that reminds us of some of our daily/regular tasks. We do also have a To-Do list (that is, yes, a spreadsheet), but that list is mainly for items with unknown due dates.
^To-Do list ^o^
We highly recommend Calendars. They are a magical invention that have greatly increased our productivity, especially since we are terrible about queuing up posts beforehand.
Support our future and current projects on Patreon for extra goodies, follow our Twitter for shenanigans, and join our Discord to chat with the devs (and other yaoi/visual novel fans!)
