Doing it eeasily...

My sugestion would be to spend a long time designing your project before you start. Then once it is designed you can sit down immediately and know what needs doing. Another thing that helps is writing a file that is basically your notes on what has been done and what you need to do next, as you think of them.

ace

Yeah even if you don't design a full engine or game at least write down what it is your trying to achive.

Example a demo that loads quake 3 maps and allows 3rd person control of an md2 model to move around in these maps and collide off the walls.

You would write down all the basic stuff you think you need to do in major tasks (no code style words or that, just like "load quake maps")

Then you could break these large steps down.

example:
main goal: get 3rd person camera control
- design input
- get model moving from input
- play a different animation due to player input

stuff like that, it seems simple but doing this has aloud me to quickly start vc++ and code within seconds, even if it is just for an hour.

I have all this wrote on paper so its easier just to glance at the left of you to see what your doing or at the end of a session to tick things off.

Another usefull thing is to write an estimated time next to each task and subtask. then once you complete it, write the actual time. so far everything i've done for my 4e4 contest has taken only 10% of the estimated time. so it makes you feel good thinking your so far ahead of schedule and knowing you'll have more time to do maps or gameplay.

i dont even try to start unless i have an entire day with nothing to do.

the ball really needs to start rolling first before i start making actual progress.

it would be nice to be able to utilize small spans of free time, but that would probably require planning and sounds too much like work.

I was working on a Breakout clone in SDL/OpenGL. It didn't work properly at all and was a complete mess, lots of different things in different source files, so I started over.

A few nights ago, in bed, I got out a pad of paper and designed my inherited object classes. I did the base class, and then derived Ball and Paddle from it, with their own member functions not related to the base.

I did this in about 10-15 minutes.

And when I got to VC++ the following day, I typed it all in. Because the thinking was already done, and I didn't have to design on the fly, it all came together in about 1/4 of the time. It was also helped by the fact that I ditched OpenGL in favour of SDL 1.2.9, which uses OpenGL instead of DirectDraw anyway AFAIK.

Believe me, that made it SO much easier - I'll now be designing everything in advance, whereas before, the design stage was a bit of extra time-wasting junk to get me the pass mark in school computing projects.

Good luck,

ukdeveloper.