#Devtober Postmortem

Hello! I've been participating in #devtober this year with this project. If you don't know devtober already, browse to the previous link first, but it mostly consist in working every day of October in a project, posting your progress on twitter and document it with a postmortem. You can follow the progress here in my twitter thread, but now you're reading the postmortem here.

Goals and expectations

I'm not a full time game developer, so my intention was to take one of my forgotten projects and start working again on it. I've been working intermitently during some years in this one, so I was determined to finish it. But to be reasonable, it's too big to munch on it in a single month. Then, my goal was to start gaining traction into gamedev again, pushing this project forward as far as I can during this month and trying to make things more reusable so I don't have to rewrite everything again in every game jam.

The Good

Some things worked really well and I should look for this patterns in future developments.

- My engine of choice when I started the project was Godot 3.X and it made my life a lot easier.

- Tree/Node scene paradigm is great for modelling collaboration and script cinematics.

- Using Notion to track pending tasks proved to be great. I used it also to document every decision.

- Tweeting (almost) everyday helped keeping the pace and add visibility to the project.

- Support from my closest social circle helped much to push forward.

The Bad

Not everything went smooth, what went really wrong? I should work really hard to avoid this ones in the future.

- Some days I couldn't get any progress due to perfectionism. Try "Better done than perfect" next time?

- Self-pressure and current health situation took my anxiety levels up to 11 and blocked me.

The Ugly

Some things didn't come as expected, but not bad per se. We can work on this easily.

- A couple of ideas weren't as rock solid as I thought, went back and forth between two of them losing some precious time.

- Understanding that I'm a team player, not a lone wolf developer.

- Feature creep. Losing the focus of this project and trying to think about the future so the template adapts correctly is a mistake. Is better to find a correct solution for this project and iterate everything for the next one.

Closing

In conclusion, #devtober was a great opportunity to start again with game development, take an old project and keep it going. Although I had some problems following everyday, the jam kept my interest on the project alive. So, in the end, I have a better game now than a month ago. Thanks and kudos to everyone making #devtober happen!

Have fun making games!