I'm making this post because over the last month or two real life has been rather busy and limited the amount of progression I have been able to make in my attempt to make myself a game developer.

Over the last few months I was able to enter and complete my first game jam and the feedback I received was far beyond any expectation I might have had when I decided to join.  I am a novice game developer trying to do as much of the work myself as I can (I know this has its drawbacks but this is the approach I want to take).

Following this feedback and the positive feeling that it gave me I started to try and give myself targets and deadlines for other things I was working on and hoping to upload in an attempt to maintain the momentum.  However, real life decided to poke its head up and slow the progress considerably.

After deciding to give myself a deadline for my shooter proof of concept for learning how to implement shooting mechanics, work became busy and a few other real world situations decided to pop up, making the time that I could focus on this project limited to non existent at the moment.  In an attempt to keep working on making games, I joined a 3 day game jam and manged to make a game in 3 days with some fairly positive feedback, but since doing this I have only been able to find the odd hour here and there to be able to do anything.

In the last week or so I have been creating more game assets for myself to use in either current or potential future projects and as practice, but there has been no real progress with the things I want to be building.

This doesn't mean I've stopped however and I certainly plan to continue learning and making games, but I think I have learned that time is my most valuable resource when it comes to making games.  I have all of these ideas, all of these plans, I know I have the capability to produce something that mostly mimics my ideas, what I don't have is an abundance of time.  So I think for now that all planned deadlines for projects should be thrown in the bin.  While they give other people an idea of when to expect your game to be released and give you a target to aim for, if you live a busy lifestyle with no real idea of when you might have time to do the work you want to do, all the deadlines do is add stress to what is likely already a stressful life.

I will be continuing to make games, but it will be at my own pace where I can work on them when I have the time.  I appreciate the feedback I have had from people on my projects so far and hope that this doesn't disappoint anyone.