Canceling Gohs Kos Ma - A #devtober Post Mortem

I love doing game jams. I'd even love to work with other people, but that did not come to fruition in this game jam. As a developer, I know how to write code, make pixel art, and even create music. I even had a whole soundtrack written for this game, but since I do not plan on using it for anything, I've decided to sell said music on the itch.io store. Here is the link https://chipjames.itch.io/chip-james-2d-action-music-pack

So I have mainly 3 areas of talking points today as to why my game did not get finished, and ultimately why I decided to cancel my game altogether. But as a broad overview here are my talking points. The FIRST reason is that I tried to help TOO many people at the beginning of the jam. The SECOND reason is that I had little programming knowledge in the godot engine. The THIRD reason is that I took soul sucking job just for no reason. So grab some popcorn with extra butter, and let's dive into why I have canceled Gohs Kos Ma.

I love to help people. So much that I tried several game projects with 2 different people. Now the first one wanted to make a game that involved a game called kindergarten, and I just wasn't down for that. When I heard the name, I thought it was just going to be a friendly kids game. I was wrong. If your still lost at what I'm talking about it's a survival horror game involving lots of kids. And most of them don't make it out alive. The second one I was working with, I had made some art for him but, we didn't talk much afterward if at all any. Then I saw a message in the devtober chat. It went a little something like this. "Asking people you don't know to collaborate with you is like pulling teeth." That's not his exact words but you get the point. The fact that I was trying to build a decent friendship with these people is laughable to say the worst. Now they aren't bad people. But my efforts were deemed futile by these people. My advice? You are your best friend and your worst enemy. Working by yourself may seem like a chore, but working with others who don't know you is even worse.

Now I have decent programming knowledge in game maker studio. But ever since game maker got bought out by Opera. I switched to Godot. I switched because they decided to use the blasphemous subscription model. Now I know there's a thing were if you had already bought the license before they switched to the subscription model, you would be good to go. But the problem with that is that you won't get any updates on the software, and should I mention that the software (while it does hold up, somewhat) is horrid when it comes to all the features that other game engines do? I can only speak on Godot's behalf but If you want smooth animations, AnimationPlayer Node. Want a smooth camera that follows the player? Camera Node. Want to ease in things from animations to variables? Tween Node. Well I hope you get the point. It even has things like text boxes, check boxes, labels, and other things that assist really well it UI elements. Game Maker doesn't have any of those things. You have to program all of those features in bit by bit if you want them to work. So as I was saying, because I switched, I'm no longer as good as I was in game maker. My Advice? If you are learning something new, just try to build small projects first. Don't try to climb a mountain, if you haven't conquered a hill yet.

Careers are the best thing to happen to someone, whereas jobs suck. I have yet to find a person that absolutely loves a job i.e retail, food service, delivery services, that is just 100% rockin' it, and it's just their life calling. I can tell you one thing DO NOT work TWO jobs if you are a creative person, it will literally kill your drive and suck the energy out of you. I can say though, while the extra money was nice, it was terrible to morale. I did enjoy a particular set of co-workers, but this isn't the point of this post mortem. I worked 5 days out of the week, and two of those days were allocated to game dev. The problem with this is that leaves 8 days in the month for programming, music, and pixel art. I just have to fill it in, but the issue is that after work, I just crashed. The next days were spent hanging out with friends because I was irritated by how my life turned upside down and I was the new fresh prince of Godot *pun intended.* But I digress. There's not a whole lot to say here, I wanted to do something but I couldn't because I had two jobs and no extra time. My Advice? If you can manage it, just work on ONE JOB or ONE CAREER then focus all of your efforts on Game Dev. Because at the end of the day game dev is a CAREER not a job. It's not like music or pixel art where you can complete it in like a day's work. It demands a lot of time and effort to get something to work, which leads me to my final point.

So at the end of the day where are we? Gohs Kos Ma was an overly ambitious project that could have gotten done if I had the skill set necessary and my time wasn't so limited. I may not have finished a game, but I am more than happy to have participated in this game jam. I'm doing the Crunchless game jam on later on this week, Imma allocate 20 hours a week to complete my game. And Imma time myself and record my progress so that way I'll always have something to look forward to. Anyways, thank you so much for reading this post mortem about devtober. I really wanted to participate in the challenge as much as possible but sadly it went by faster than I expected.