Devtober 2024 Post Mortem

So unfortunately, I did not accomplish my goals for this Devtober, and did not have my project in a finished enough state to submit it to the jam. I tried to work on the project a little bit every day, and it was working out at the start, but then my work on the project started to dwindle. There would be long periods of time during the jam where I just wasn’t working on it. 

To be a little fairer to myself, I did have other projects I was trying to work on throughout October. Looking back on it, maybe that was the big contributor to why things didn’t move as much as I wanted to. I had a couple projects I was trying to work on at once without a specific schedule as to when I wanted to do all these things other than “throughout October.” I have a tendency to throw myself into a negative feedback loop when it comes to deadlines and the stress associated with them where as a deadline looms over me, stress starts to accumulate, so I try to do something to take off the stress, but then I end up de-stressing for too long, and now I have less time to do what I wanted to, and now I have more stress. This is a habit that I’ve come to recognize recently and have been trying to find ways to combat, and I think progress is being made, albeit somewhat slowly. 

To give a little bit of credit to myself, the work I did do was pretty good. I got a significant portion of at least one of my game's core pillars done, and I had a framework ready to go for another. I even got this work done pretty quickly, all things considered. If I had been working more consistently throughout this jam, this game would've been in a pretty complete state, mechanically speaking. Art and sound is something else entirely that I still need to look into, but I'll worry about one thing at a time.

I’m learning to open up a bit more about my projects, and find ways to keep the pressure to work up in a healthier way. Something I’ve been hearing about recently and want to try applying more moving forward is the concept of social pressure. When more people know about your project and keep asking questions about it, it incentivizes further discussion from you as well as encourages continuous work on the project. Participating in this Devtober helped open me up to that a little more, though I still need to work on the “talking about my project” and “talking more in general” side of things. 

I’m not going to give up here - I want to keep working on what I have, keeping up with posts on my sideblog on tumblr that I made for this jam, and maybe reach out to a few of my other friends and peers to see who can help me out with this social pressure thing. I may have missed the mark, but I won’t let this be the end - I’m not stopping now!