Post Mortem

Background and my goals

So I participated in the "Devtober Game Jam 2021". I wanted to not only become better at developing games but also at managing my time. I want to be a game developer since a very long time but did not manage to finish one actual game, as small as it might be. Often I come up with cool ideas, but then end up abandoning them in the end. I am pretty sure, that is what most devs struggling with. So I hoped that by participating in the devtober challenge I could finally achieve the goal and actually finish a game, like I said ... as small as it might be. Did I achieve this goal? No. Did this challenge fail for me then? Absolutely not!

Premise

I started the challenge by setting some rules for myself, while mostly sticking to the recommended ones of devtober.

- Working on the project and post updates about it on a daily base

- Use as few youtube tutorials as possible. I ended up in that tutorial hell several times now

- Creating all assets by myself - quality is secondary. I wanted to go through each process by myself.

What went wrong

In this section I will try to reflect about everything that didn't went so well.

When I started this I already kinda knew, that I would struggle with creating the 3D assets. I study computer sciences mixed with media production so the whole process of 3D modelling is not new to me, but I never was particulary good at it, mostly because I often didn't want to invest my time in learning it, since it is not the most fun thing for me to do. I had to restart my 3D character models about three or four times and wasted a good amount of time with that. I set myself the rule of "Quality is secondary", especially in creating the 3D stuff, but for some reason I still wanted to meet an unreasonable standard for a one person project and especially for me basically trying to get better at it. I ended up creating a character I really like up to now tho, I still feel like I lost a bit of time there just because of some unreasonable expectations.

Sticking to 3D asset creation for now another big problem was the characters cloth. I wanted to give my character a cloak, with believable cloth physics. I researched about that and figured that it couldn't be super hard. It turns out, there are A LOT of ways to actually achieve this. You can "hardcode" the cloaks movement in the animations itself. You can setup an armeture system that controls the cloaks movement, or you can use the built in physics system of the game engine of your choice. None of these solutions worked for me to be satisfied with it, the built in cloth physics in the Godot Engine straight up just didn't work as expected and to this date I have no idea why. I am certain that I screwed up and not the engine, but that was pretty frustrating. I ended up scrapping the cloak, looking at it afterwards, I should have scrapped it way sooner. It costed me about three whole days.

When it comes to programming I had the least problems. This is where I feel comfortable at and what is the most fun to me. But of course there where problems as well. Coming from mainly 2D development, it was super hard for me to get the camera movement done. Here I had to use some youtube tutorials, to get the general idea of it but I kept it minimal. I eventually came up with a working camera movement, that was kinda a mixture of the tutorials and my own ideas.

Another big problem for me was programming the UI properly. Godot's UI system is one of the best out there in my opinion, but it's still not easy to use if you're new to it. I wasn't really new to it, but for some reason I forgot about a lot of it. Kinda like in a exam situation where you just black out. In the final iteration I am still not satisfied with the menus, because it lacks a lot of features I wanted to have in them like remapping controls, seperate audio volumes for BGM and SFX and so on.

Concerning the daily twitter posts, I sometimes had the case that I didn't have something to show for the day and ended up rushing something *just* to have an update to post. 

What went good

Besides all the stuff that went wrong, I had tons of fun during the challenge. 

I already mentioned that 3D modelling is not the thing I am the best at, but I gotta say, I am super satisfied with how the character turned out in the end, and especially with the animations. They can definitely be improved, but I had tons of fun creating and tweaking them to my liking, and except for a few minor critique points I am super happy with them. All the animations also where done in like half a day.

Programming the main gameplay mechanics into the project was done pretty quick as well. It's not like I did them all in a few days, but everytime I wanted to implement a new feature I almost always ended up finishing that feature on the same day. The only exception here would be the feeling of the wall run. That took quite a while until everything really felt right and it wasn't awkward to control.

Since I am a musician since I am 6 years old, creating the music wasn't the biggest problem for me. I should have taken a bit more time for that, so I ended up using an old track of mine, on which I added some more instruments and remastered it. I am pretty happy with how it turned out. The SFX were also done on one day, and while they definitiely could use some love still, they do the job fine.

I also stuck to my rule of working and posting updates on this project on a daily basis. You can see the whole twitter thread over here: https://twitter.com/theelegist/status/1444033164599508995?s=20 Despite on the fact mentioned earlier with rushed features *just* to have something to show, that went pretty good as well.

Conclusion

I consider this challenge as "successful" because of all the stuff I learned about developing something in 3D and trying to manage my time. If I was to start over this project I could optimise a lot things in my workload and would have a much clearer direction where I need to go with it. I even think I could actually create a 3D model that looks somewhat professional, even tho it is still not my favourite thing to do in game development. Ultimately I think participating in the devtober made me better at developing games and actually sticking to a project without abandoning it in an early stage. 

I stuck to most of my rules as well.

- I worked on the project *almost* daily with update posts every day

- I mainly used youtube tutorials for stuff I have *never* done like 3D asset creation and the general idea of implementing a 3D camera

- All the assets I used in the game are made by myself except for the fonts.

Thank you so much for taking your time to read through this or to play the demo I came up with in these 31 days. I hope you enjoyed it and if you are a fellow developer I could help you with writing down my experience on a challenge like this.