POST MORTEM
Overall I'm satisfied with the work I've managed to do on this game during this year's Devtober. It's the first Devtober where I don't have anything to submit (or at least anything I'd consider worthy of submitting), but I'm more fine with this than I would've been a few years ago since I've become better at forgiving myself for not working all the time every single day. There was also straight up a week and some change where I physically could not have worked on the game, so I've no reason to beat myself up over that either. Anyway let's talk about the stuff I did.
The Stuff I Did
This is gonna sound weird but I basically made no mistakes (THAT I'M AWARE OF) while working on this project during Devtober. Not to say I didn't get caught up on certain issues or bugs to fix, but once I fixed the stuff it ended up exactly how I wanted it to. And everything else I pretty much managed to implement smoothly. The game definitely needs more design and programming work, but the stuff I managed to get done this past month got done quite well. Basically, while working on this game, I experienced a lot of moments where I thought "Wow, I'm so glad I know how to do this now," whereas on a previous project I might have needed to look up every single little thing as I was going through it, or drastically compromise on the design because of my inability to do the thing properly. Still needed to look up a lot of stuff though, because making video games, but this time it was LESS. I'm just happy that I'm at the point where, when I open up Unreal, I feel like I know what I'm doing, instead of feeling like a scared wimpy goblin poking a sleeping ogre with a stick. And the best part of all of this is it only took like 4 years to get to this point.
Still, though, discipline is hard, and I had as hard of a time with it as with every other game I've worked on. Every time I sat down to work on this game during Devtober I had to do a whole ritual before sitting down at my computer and guzzle like 5 energy drinks (sometimes it was 4, ok, there I said it). The rituals do help, though, so to you I recommend finding something that makes you feel comfortable before you start working; if you're not confident or at ease or mentally ready to take on a task, you probably won't make much headway once you start. It can be an extremely simple thing, too, like going to pour a glass of water or walking around your house for a second or something.
Also, I found that something that helped me while working on this game was constantly asking myself, as I was working on it, "What am I working on and why am I doing it?" I get distracted and lose focus easily, so I often find myself just staring at the screen wondering what I was in the middle of doing, or why I'm messing around with this particular block of code. This is because I probably have undiagnosed ADHD. In any case, though, once I got in the habit of making sure to prod my brain every so often with this question, it reduced the frequency and length of these moments. I recommend working this into your own process.
Conclusion
And thus bada bing in here lies some of my knowledge I gained while working on this project; I hope it helps you in some way. Also, wow, I've been calling this project "this project" or "this game" a lot. I don't actually have a name for it; the project is titled "Railgun" in Unreal, but that's probably not going to be its actual name. You know what, as a surprise at the end of this here post mortem I'll list a few name ideas I have for this game, because everyone is dying to know (I happen to know this for a fact). Here's a short list of ideas:
- Railgun
- Last Front
- Railgunner
- The Arrival
- Boy, That Sure is A Lot of Aliens
- Dimension Invaders
Who knows if I'll use one of these or come up with a new one, but I figured I should lay some ideas out here since the game has gone unnamed for so long. Well I guess it's technically still unnamed since these are only potential names, but like, now I guess you can pick one you like and make it your own head canon for my game's name. Because I know you really want to do that. OK I'm out of silly stuff to say, thank you for reading and I hope this log helped.