New Teammates, New Distractions, New Realizations - A #devtober Post Mortem by Chip James

Greetings, Everyone! 

Before I start, I  just want to say that I am 100% super grateful for this game jam. It's been a lot of fun to work with my good friend "Torball," and this jam has helped me get out of the comfort zone (of just copying and pasting code). DO NOT go out and witch hunt him. He's a great friend, and I don't want people doing that. Now, on to my thoughts about the progress of the jam.

TL;DR for those who need it. Wanted to make a game, coded mechanics for the game and learned new concepts for Godot. Needed art but I never got any art from my friend. We were both working on different games for the majority of the jam. I burned out, but realized that I was proud of the growth I had with coding towards the end of the jam. 

Everyone has ideas. This is nothing new, but sometimes, ideas are put on a shelf, to be picked up later again. I was seriously considering on not doing a "post mortem," because I figured I had nothing to show, and I just wanted to give up half way through. It didn't dawn on me until the last minute that I had an idea for a new game, a game that only I would work on.  But other than that, I can think of three main points as to why my game with Torball was put on hold. There wasn't a clear communication on the production of assets, we both had different ideas we wanted to work on, and lastly I burned out at the end of the jam. Let us begin.

Before the jam started, I told my friend Torball that I wanted to do the #devtober jam, because I had to do better than last year. I've been learning more and more about Godot, and this would be a great game jam to really flex what I've been learning lately. He agreed to help me; I was ecstatic! I really felt like we could make something special, and we will in due time. We had to decide on what to make, and the first thing that popped in my mind was that we should make a metroidvania fighter. He made a video explaining the creative sub-genres of fighting games that we could probably make, so I figured we could make something similar. So the first 5 days of the jam, I was writing code for the platformer physics, collisions, and player controller.  It wasn't the most interesting stuff to code, but I figured out something really cool. In Godot, you can set a "Base Node" to run Input events. You don't even have to touch the input map. A little bit more rigid, but it works really good nonetheless. No lag or anything like that in the game. Fast forward to day 7 and the base mechanics were pretty much done. I was ready for some art. So I hit up Torball for some art, and he told me that he'd be working on some of his other projects. I can get that. There's a certain level of identity and freedom you get when you work on your personal projects. I don't like making demands to people, especially when it comes to friends.  So I let him do his thing. Fast forward to day 20, and I still had no art. I wasn't mad at him, but I was just a little taken aback because I was expecting some art, and I never got any. He told me to use placeholder art so I used a stickman.  Other than that, I got absolutely no art for the duration of the jam. This is in no way an attack, or slander, or anything like that. We also didn't really have a design doc at all for the game, so I can't blame him for not getting me art. The main thing we wanted in the game was "Run around, And Fight People." But I learned something. I learned that I need to make a set plan, and have everyone that I'm working with adhere to the plan. Sure, plans can change, but this taught me that planning is important, no matter how small the project is.

I love new ideas. Even more than my old ones that never got finished (looking at you Gohs Kos Ma). I've been dealing with something called "Shiny Object Syndrome." If you don't know what that is, it's basically when you jump from idea to idea because the other one just "seems better." I can only say for myself, but this is quite a debilitating situation to be in. Not only is it detrimental to start over when you have put in the work for a game of some sort, but it is also EVEN MORE demotivating when you have a lot of projects that you want to finish, but can't because you don't know how to go about starting them. My advice? Just START. Pick an idea and run with it. Ideas are literally a dime a dozen. Personally I think ideas are worth ABSOLUTELY NOTHING without execution. There was once I had a dream about a character that can transform into monsters in a 6x3 grid, and would play much like the battle network games. This idea, by itself, is nothing special. I'm pretty sure that people have already started and/or working their own battle network clones, due to the legacy collection for battle network coming out next year.  The point that I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't treasure some ideas more than others, they are literally all worth the same. And that is nothing without execution.

Burnout is the bane of creativity. So much so that it's almost normalized by crunch in game dev. Towards the end of the jam, I felt worn out. I had made a decent player controller, and had made some more tweaks to the physics but other than that I was working on a visual mockup for a new game. This was a platform fighting room based game where you fight enemies and level up your skills. The console was the NES but I only got the art done. After it was done, I didn't go back to the project. I just couldn't finish what I had started. I then wanted to make a bunch of games when I really should've been working on just ONE project. There's not much else to say other than I burned out and I wish I would've stayed with the project. But what else was there to do?

That was an exposition dump! If you made it this far, I'm grateful that you gave me the time of day to listen to me. I know I could've probably made it much much shorter, but I like writing these long form post mortems. It helps me collect my thoughts and reflect on the outcome. Looking back on it now, I am quite proud of the growth I made with Godot. If were to give myself a scale for level of mastery in Godot, I feel like I'm a solid 6 out of 10. There are still things I don't know but 8 through 10 are more on the mastery side of things. Our plan is to work on the metroidvania fighter in our spare time. I don't know how often we will work on it, but it was still a fun time. I will definitely be joining #devtober next year as a solo dev though. I want to be able to think of a cool mechanic for a video game and be able to code it 100% in Godot with no tutorials. I can always work on polishing so that's nothing new, but my goal is to put out products. Products that are fun to play, and ones that can make the retro gamers smile. As always, let me know your thoughts! I do read and reply to literally everything as long as it's appropriate. 

And thank you so much for reading, it means the world to me.