I realize I did not keep a devlog, so let me give a quick summary of my Devtober experience.
I chose to make a platformer game because I am still a beginner and wanted something with a lot of tutorials in case I needed help. I spent the first week designing the main character, the world and overall theme, and the game mechanics. Made the decision to get the art done first before the prototype, which was probably a bad choice in hindsight. However, I had little experience with animation and wanted to be sure that I had plenty of time to figure it out. I completed a lot of the art assets before realizing that it would take too long to finish them. After that I decided to work on the prototype. I took a week off to spend time with relatives, and applied and studied for job opportunities. Work on the prototype in Godot 4 Beta, until I came across something I couldn’t fix, which was the engine’s renderer causing anti-aliasing on the pixel art. Since I couldn’t get any help as no-one got back to me when I posted the error I re-worked it into Godot 3 during the last few days of October. I certainly wish I could have done more, but the result is a great starting point, and I’ll keep the work habits I learned in Devtober and continue the project. (Maybe even enter it in the “Finish Up Your Game” Jam coming up :D)
The takeaway is that I didn’t finish a game, but I thoroughly enjoyed myself and learned a lot!
What I learned from this project:
What NOT to do:
- Postpone creating a working prototype
- Overscope
- Forget to account for interruptions
- Use an in-development engine that I’m not familiar with. Even if it has really great tile mapping features, you’re better off making something in an engine you are familiar with!
What TO do:
- Enjoy yourself, this is a casual jam, not a competition (although you should probably try to have fun in competitions too)
- Learn from mistakes. Failure is not a permanent thing, you can and should improve yourself and learn from your mistakes until you finally can make a game.
What I should do NEXT game jam:
- Get the prototype done first. Make the idea simple, something you can make in about 25% of the game jam’s timeframe. Then work on adding art and everything else.
- Stick with the engine(s) I’m most familiar with. Now this can be a bad thing if the engine severely limits you, but Godot 3 and Unity are perfectly capable engines so I don’t have to worry about switching. Godot 3 is super simple for pixel art games, so I prefer to use it.
- Make a plan for interruptions. Life happens, in a month a lot of things can crop up, so I’ll make sure that I don’t plan out something that would take up the entire month next time.
I’ll be sharing some GIFs and art from the project on the Devtober Discord if you want to check it out! (Here's a short GIF)
