Making a star chart: Planning is key!
April 14, 2017, by Alayna
Our rocket went off track, and then ran out of fuel. But we're making a star chart to get us back on track!
We've learned a lot since we started building Constellations over a year ago. We can't believe it's been 14 months since the demo was shown in Madrid! Since then, we've gone off course a little, and we've run out of fuel. Horned Llama Studio is a two-person affair, and we both have other jobs and other side hustles, so sadly this venture can't always be our highest priority.
But we're back, and we're better than ever.
Pontus has moved to a new city, a new day job, and a new life that seems to involve a lot of travelling, but he's settling in. In terms of Horned Llama projects, his attention is on finishing Wizlets (which is nearly done, but you know what they say about the last 10%). That leaves me to drive (or fly) Constellations onwards, while keeping track of the dates and schedules for all our projects.
Scheduling and planning is important, of course. While I've always unofficially played a producer role in the company, we haven't been as clear on deadlines and schedules as we could be. We haven't had set goals for when to release our games and other media because, as we already mentioned, Horned Llama is not our day job and hasn't been our main priority. But not having a good schedule means things not only move slowly, they sometimes don't move at all, so we're working on setting better goals in Trello and continuing to move forward!
While working on my thesis, I've also learned a lot in the last year about writing and narrative design, so I'm overhauling the story of Constellations to make it even better. Our processes for planning, writing, and inputting the narrative are still not perfect, but we're getting there.
This might not be the happiest of blog entries, but it is a fresh start. We're all about transparency, so this is us acknowledging our mistakes and our neglect of our projects, but we're hopeful moving forwards! We're making better star charts to help us on our journey, both in planning our time and planning our narrative, and we can't wait for you to join us on our travels.