Gaining Momentum and Confidence

Two (well, kind of) game jams later, and I am getting pretty confident with unity. I have decided to pick Stardust back up as a long term project because I am still in love with the idea of this game afte 5 months. I submitted Stardust for Ludum Dare 41, which was my first real dive into game development since a Google game jam I did back in 2014. At the time I was studying computer science at a university which is what gave me the programming and development foundation for doing game dev today. Now, earlier this year I attempted to get a team of friends and acquaintances whom were interested in helping me with development together. Nobody else besides me was programming and ultimately that fell apart but I learned a great deal from the experience. I was not well versed enough to articulate responsibilities clearly so my project management skills were lacking. Which is where game jams come in.

So, the idea: for the team to do game jams together as kind of training boot camp for game dev. I asked around to see if it was a good idea and didn't really get a response, so I went for it. Scheduled everyone to meet  at my place for Ludum Dare 41. It was going to be the kick off to our game development careers! Well needless to say that was a crazy romanticized idea and nobody could make it except for my fiance, Kristi (of course she was already there). So Her and I alone worked on Stardust all weekend. I did the programming and she did the art. Overall i was pretty pleased with the project and wanted to continue working on it but everytome i picked it up i would just scroll through code and mess with the editor not really getting anything done. So my interest tapered off after releasing an update the first week after the jam. Which brings me to Ludum Dare 42...

So we decided to try and do every Ludum Dare after we made Stardust. LD 42 rolls around, we get the theme, struggle with it a bit, come up with a concept and get to work. I'll spare you the details and just say it was a flop, we had friends over the same weekend who tried to help out but weren't really invested and proved to be more of a distraction. However I did gain more experience and flexed my coding muscles a great deal. I Implemented an inventory system I can use in any game and started suspecting more and more that I (as the programmer) was getting more out of this than anyone.

Around the same time as the jam my buddy who was part of the team I got together earlier in the year messaged me about getting together to do the Game Maker Toolkit Game Jam. I was stoked to try working with him again. While I'm glad we finished something to submit I was pretty disappointed in the game. I worked my ass off  managing the project, programming the code base and getting the other members to help where they could. Ultimately this took time away from me coding. With that said I learned a great deal about project management from the experience which is invaluable.

Now that I've described my journey through this I want to point out some takeaways.

1. Game jams are not for the faint of heart. They are intense for inexperienced developers. My brain felt like mush before I went to bed each night of the jam. I managed to use this to accelerate my game dev endeavours.

2. If I were to do it again I would do the jam without an artist. Kristi didn't not learn much if anything from cranking out art as fast as possible.

3. With that said I do not think I would have learned a basic dev skill on how to seperate the mechanics from the visuals and polish in the development process. Looking back I could have done a lot more for Stardust when I thought I needed art assets.

4. Game jams worked for me to push me over the road block of getting started by giving a deadline and a theme. This forced me to look up the minimum amount of effort needed to accomplish a development task rather than having the freedom to find the 'perfect' solution which can be extremely overwhelming.

5. I was able to see the overall development process in a short period of time on a small scope. Which is helping me to build the framework in my head for how to think about game dev

Now that I have gone through this I feel ready to take on a long term project. I still love game jams and am planning to do LD43 compo alone this December, leaving a whole team jam to maybe once or twice a year.

Now, my main purpose for this post was to announce my dedication to Stardust. I plan to post updates once a week until release which I am shooting for early next year. Thanks for reading and follow me if your interested!