Backlog Burndown #16 - To Infinity and Aveyond - on Marooner's Rock

Today on Marooner's Rock, I take on Aveyond: Lord of Twilight, the first in a four part, episodic take on the classic sprite-based RPG genre. It's got humans, good (non-sparkly) vampires, bad (again non-sparkly) vampires, and a cave full of spiders!

Backlog Burndown: Gearcrack Arena

Backlog Burndown's Let's Play takes on the curious case of Gearcrack Arena, one of Steam's "ghost games." Maybe the quickest full game playthrough I've ever had, with a credit sequence that's almost as long as the gameplay itself.



Read the full Backlog Burndown column on Marooner's Rock.

Marooner's Rock Game Review - Necropolis

Over on Marooner's Rock, I tackled Harebrained Schemes' take on the Roguelike dungeon crawler, Necropolis. A fun, sometimes frustrating game, it's one that I'll be coming back to in due time when the Backlog Burndown eventually (probably in about four years) gets to it.

"Drawing difficulty cues from the Dark Souls series, Necropolis differentiates itself with a cel-shaded art style and a world that’s different every time you play. As either a Brute (bigger, slower, seems to absorb more damage) or a Blackguard (smaller, faster, trading durability for speed) you and up to three networked co-op friends descend into the depths of the Necropolis, a huge magical construct created by the ancient wizard Abraxis."

 Check out the full review, or pick up your own copy on Steam, or Xbox One.

Backlog Burndown: Space Harrier II Full Playthrough

The quest for backlog reduction took me to Space Harrier II. Unlike Bio-Hazard Battle, SHII turned out to be possible to complete in a single session, with individual levels averaging less than five minutes. Thus, rather than chopping up levels, I was able condense an hour and a half's worth of repetition and death to a single half-hour or so full run!



Read the full Backlog Burndown column on Marooner's Rock.

Productivity Update - Trello and Me

For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been a procrastinator. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been able to time manage and plan when I absolutely needed to, but most of the time I could skate by with a last second effort. From time to time I’d make an effort to get organized though. Day planners, electronic organizers, notebooks, a Palm Pilot, more notebooks, various phone apps on Android, Windows, and iOS platforms, I’ve tried a lot of things over the last twenty years.

My Trello board overview and Pomodoro timer.

Nothing ever really took, despite my task load gradually increasing over the years. It’s not that difficult to keep all your organization in your head when you’re a sixteen-year-old kid with only school, a few chores, and a part-time job to deal with. College assignments added additional complexity, but everything was still manageable. But a good software job, five kids, and an aspiring side platform as a blogger/streamer/writer meant I just couldn’t keep all those balls in the air anymore.

Enter John Somnez’s blog on secrets to crazy productivity, and the introduction of Trello to my life.

I’ve been working in an Agile environment for years. Sprints, Kanban boards, and daily standups have been a part of my working life for a decade, but I’d never applied those principles to the rest of my life. With Trello, I started to.

John’s methodology involves assigning Pomodoro estimates to all of your tasks, then taking time at the start of your week to plan out what you intend to accomplish each day. For the first couple of months, I did exactly that. After a while I started to get a pretty good feel for how long common tasks will take, so I stopped assigning time estimates. I still do the daily planning though, which has become a vital component in my week.

Daily planning works like this: at the start of my week, I map out all the things I know I’m going to try to get done. Work tasks, workouts, writing time, Twitch streams, planned chores, and anything else I can think of goes somewhere in the Monday – Saturday list.

This serves three main purposes: first, it’s a reminder throughout the week of what I need to get done. I add new tasks as appropriate when I run into something new that I need to get done. Second, this serves to help me not bite off more than I can chew in a given week. For example, on a typical workday, I know I have time for my work tasks, a workout, and 2-4 additional Pomodoros worth of tasks before I call it a night. Anything beyond that probably isn’t going to get done unless I move an existing task out. Third, I try to list out tasks in the order and priority that I want to accomplish them. This significantly reduces the amount of time wasted on “What do I do next?” questions.

Big personal projects (the reclaimed shipping pallet wine racks I’m building, for example) I break out on their own boards. For these I do a task breakdown and time estimates, then pull individual tasks into my general week planner when I have capacity in my week.

The results have been nothing short of remarkable. You know that feeling of having forgotten something, or knowing that there’s some task left undone? For the first time in years I don’t go to bed feeling that. Closing a task feels good. Clearing an entire day’s board feels great. Pushing tasks off to the next day feels less good, but beats wondering three days later whether you remembered to set a youtube video to launch on time.

The Pomodoro component isn’t entirely flawless, particularly for some of my personal tasks. Exercise routines don’t work well with running a Pomodoro timer, nor do the few tasks where I’m able to legitimately multitask (for example, editing videos while logging elements of my sports card collection). However, for most of these tasks I’ve gotten a good feel for how long they take, which serves the same function of the Pomodoro timer for these things. Dragging a weightlifting task from today over to “Completed this week” means I spent two to three Pomodoros on it, regardless of whether the Trello board knows it or not.

I’ve been running this plan for several months now. My blog is updating regularly, I’m writing more, and more productive at work. Even better, interruptions to my routine have become much easier to recover from. For example, I recently returned from a conference that, between travel and participation, burned a week of my time. It was great, but threw my entire routine out. I was back on track by the end of the week. The previous time I attended a conference like this, I was off schedule for a month.

My next step is going to be teaching my kids to use this system as they start getting into Jr. High and High School. My education was excellent in many ways, but I wish someone had taught me some of these time management techniques a long time ago.

Backlog Burndown #15 - Stranded

Today on Marooner's Rock, I cover art/walking sim game Stranded.

This isn't a bad game, but your individual enjoyment is heavily dependent on your personal tolerance for slightly pretentious "Games as Art" type things.

Let's Play: Star Wars: X-Wing vs TIE Fighter: Balance of Power - Rebel Campaign Mission #15

It's been a long time coming, but we've finally reached the end of the Rebel missions in Balance of Power.



There's a major bug in this mission that makes doing it on higher difficulty levels nearly impossible. While you should have six waves of fighters to work with, you only have one, regardless of what difficulty setting you choose. Given that, I dropped down to easy to at least get the ability to target components.

While I flew an X-Wing in the video, I'd actually recommend the B-Wing for this. For reasons stated during the playthrough, the B-Wing will give you enough Heavy Rockets to knock out the shields on the SSD, kill all the Assault Transports, and still be able to either finish off the SSD yourself, or go give ISD Rage a bad day.

But however you choose to play it, killing the SSD before the Shipyard can take too much damage is definitely an easier way to get the win than just hanging back and trying to intercept warheads coming in on the Shipyard.

Good luck, and keep flying.