The Schedule

At no point so far have we talked about timescales or deadlines, self financing hobbyist's can probably afford to take as long as they like to create their dream - however people with commercial interests (and bills to pay) cannot!

Regardless of your motivation a schedule is a good idea. Some people use specialist project tools (like Microsoft Project) or spreadsheets (like Excel) a quick google search will list hundreds of different ones ranging from free to expensive, very bad to very good - the choice is yours, simply find a tool your happy with (or can get used to) and go with it. Even a simple text editor will do (if you don't mind adding up the days spent yourself).

The key thing with a schedule is simply to list all the tasks that need to be completed (you made this in step 5 - remember) in the order they need to be done and to "guess-timate" how long each one will take. If your working as part of a team then you can "assign" tasks to each team member (again making notes about the order in which tasks need to be completed so that different members arn't holding one another up) - tools such as gant charts (google for more info) are perfect for this. Obviously the key issue here are the timescales assigned to each task - this is extremely hard to judge even for seasoned professionals (hence the term "guess-timate") although obviously experience does help - as a general rule of thumb allow a good 20%-50% more than you first thought giving you some breathing room to iron out bugs and to rework things (it's not uncommon for that figure to rise to 100% - 150% more than you first thought - overestimating your abilities can lead to lot's of sleepless nights bashing away at best or wildly missed deadlines at worst).

Missing deadlines on tasks can be disheartening - don't sweat it too much, it might be your timescale was wildly inaccurate or you underestimated the time it would take, learn from the experience and move on (you can always makeup time on other tasks) however take note - charting your progress on your schedule can help you to remain focused and keep you on track. If you find yourself missing all or most of them then you might need to re-evaluate the project or think about getting some extra help on board.

A useful addition to the schedule is the concept of "milestones" or set points along the projects development where you can realisticaly map progress and see things starting to develop - not only are these good for the overal moral of the team (long development times with little "apparent" progress are notorious for killing enthusiasm) but often they will be used by outside investors to judge the progress of the project and be a pre-requisite for staged payments.