So I haven’t posted a dev blog in a while... a year to be precise. Over the past year I have been developing The Shortest Draw game here and there when I had spare time. But to be honest, development slowed down because I felt burnt out. The later half 2019 was a busy time for me at work, one of our busiest time of the year, constantly feeling tired after work just gave me no motivation to develop on my days off and on top of that I was just simply losing passion. All in all, I was feeling a bit stuck in life.
And of course 2020 began and a whole 'nother list of events just seemed to push me back....but here I am, ready and feeling refreshed! well kinda...
How did I get my creative juice and motivation back you ask? Well, to be honest, it's not back 100%. I've learnt to accept that It's alright to not be 100%, I have my highs and my lows just like everyone else. One main factor that boosted my motivation is posting short clips of my game on Reddit and game dev forums for feedback, getting that dopamine hit from the upvotes and encouraging feedback was just the thing I needed. Before that, I never really posted game dev stuff outside of this blog, so I felt quite alone during the development journey. But after getting the community involved it felt like I was creating a game for a bigger audience than myself.
One mistake was not setting a clear end goal for my game, meaning I didn't really have a solid idea of what the game should contain and how it should generally run; yes I know I should have created a design doc or brief, or even broke the project into smaller goals/pieces, but at the time I was too excited and eager to get the ball rolling. Well, lesson learnt I'd say!
Having understood that; I took some time to create an end goal of how I envisioned the game, alongside that I created some smaller goals. All this I organised on Trello and with that gave me a clearer vision and stronger motivation to tackle the project.
Buts that enough about me, now back to the game!
What will the next dev blogs read?
As I mentioned, over the past year I did a bit of development here and there. In the next few dev blogs I want to backtrack to talk about what I've developed, the struggles and challenges I faced, how I've overcome them and my thought process behind them. I will cover some general game design stuff as well, such as design decisions and art.
I'm not sure how often I'll be pumping these out but I’m hoping it'll be more consistent than before.
So until next time!
Tuan Vu