Devtober Post-Mortem
Well, I can't believe I made it all the way through this challenge!
I went into devtober knowing that I wanted to work on my personal project. It's something I had started this summer but never found much time to work on it. I knew I wasn't going to finish the project over the course of the month but I'm actually amazed how much I managed to accomplish!
Although it doesn't look much like a game yet I feel like i made a ton of progress. I managed to fix a ton of bugs, and added some important mechanics to the gameplay.
The biggest feat this month was setting up a dialogue system. From branching dialogue choices to dynamic npcs, overall it was a huge learning experience for me.
Some other noteworthy accomplishments include, ladders, palette switching, parallax scrolling, hiding the cursor and fancy transitions. Plus a ton of bug fixes and a bit of artwork!
Despite not actually having much time on a daily basis to work on this project, finding a small thing to do each day was extremely rewarding. Some days it was only 5-10 minutes of work but I figure that's 5-10 more minutes than I would have spent working on this project otherwise! Any progress is better than none and it's amazing how fast little things add up!
The best part of this challenge for me was feeling accountable to make progress each day. It's extremely easy to put off personal projects but knowing that other people were undergoing the same challenge was a huge motivation to open up my project every day as well. Plus i love seeing progress through screenshots. It's such a clear visual representation of how far you've come.
There’s only one goal I didn’t reach this month and it was putting a proper save system in place! I got something super basic working but it still needs adjustments since I used a tutorial and don’t really understand how it works exactly!
I still have a mountainous task ahead of me if I’m ever going to make this project into a proper game, but I really feel like I’ve taken the first steps! I’m planning on continuing this project over the coming months, possibly for the #100daysofGameDev challenge! I’m already almost a third of the way there after all! I do think I need a day or 2 to recuperate after this month though. Trying to balance 2 jobs, commissions, a short-film challenge, #devtober, #octobit and a social life has been absolutely exhausting, but has also felt unbelievably rewarding! It’s amazing what you can do when you put your mind to something and I’m so glad participated this year!
More to come with this project, that much is for sure!
@rsvpasap1 on twitter if you're interested in my daily progress!
This exact post-mortem in a GoogleDoc