A Postmortem for a Dear Rhino Beetle

Hi All! This is my Devtober postmortem. Because I'm ethically compelled not to let myself give up before the clock strikes midnight, I'm gonna make this brief so I can keep working to see if I can complete my project before the end of the month. For those of you unfamiliar with Devtober, Ellian started it last year as a challenge to make a game in a month. This year, it was focused more on building good gamedev habits (which I really appreciated!), but I still decided to start and try to complete a game within that one month period.

Successes

This month was a great month of learning for me. The game I chose to make is a 3D rail-shooter in the style of starfox called Dynastinae. It featured several deviations from the classic starfox formula, almost all of which were cut by the end due to time constraints. I used this project as a way to start using my new project management software (its called Regular-Boring-Old-Index-Cards, have you heard of it?), and to that end I mostly succeeded. As this was the main growth goal for me for this month, I will consider this month wildly successful even if I can't manage to push out a demo build by midnight.

Roadblocks

While I managed to implement more of my project management system this month, I ran into a few major roadblocks that really ate away at my ability to succeed in actual development endeavors. I had severe chest and sinus congestion for nearly the whole month. Every morning I would wake up with crap in my lungs and a throbbing face headache. And since most (pretty much all) of my dev time is in the hours before my wife and children wake up (4 or 5 am to 7 or 8 am), this health issue really cut into my dev time. Another big roadblock (and the main thing I was trying to practice NOT doing) was scope and feature bloat. I started this project with a decent amount of work and features, but I kept adding cool things and spending time exploring possibility--some of which were super fun to play with. I explored CSG subtraction and types of bullet management and shaders and--well you get the idea. I was more ruthless than I had been in limiting my ever-bloating aspirations, but it still was not enough to stay on schedule.

What I Learned

I learned a few super cool things this month that I will definitely be taking with me into future endeavors:
1. I will continue to use some new coding/engine tricks I learned during this month (for example, the propagate_call("method") method and dot(VIEW, NORMAL) in spatial shaders).
2. I will also continue to focus scope using my index card project management. This was probably the key to my initial success in getting and keeping scope down in the first place, and the points when I stopped checking in with what my index cards said were my worst moments for letting an unplanned experiment consume a whole day.
3. I'm definitely gonna keep bouncing ideas in the couple gamedev discord groups I frequent.
I still have tons of things to learn, but as I practice focusing my initial dreams for projects and aligning means to those dreams while trimming off any extras, I'll be able to make more engaging experiences for players (and I'll be able to finish on time *sigh*)

What I Will Do Better Next Time

While I feel that I accomplished my major goals this month, there were a few things that I need to do better:
1. I intended to begin each hour or so of dev time with a graph paper dev log. I did really good at this for the first...hour. I used it intermittantly to solve problems as I went, but the amount of benefit I've had from stepping away from my computer to solve problems has in no way correlated with the amount of time I've spent doing it. I'll definitely be practicing that in future endeavors (and actually, I have a pomodoro timer which will hopefully work perfectly for this purpose going forward)
2. While I was hoping to add more unique features and experiences in this game, systems I didn't build robustly enough and last minute adaptations to try to finish left my game lacking a lot of the interesting things I had hoped for it to engage players with. I realize that it's easier to copy or borrow mechanics that I already know are fun from other games, but one the main things I like about gamedev is creating experiences that feel very different from games players have played before. In the future, I'll be focusing on building and refining these defining characteristics and trying to exclude other things.

Conclusion

You've made it to the end! Thanks for reading! If you're still as excited about this project as I am, don't worry! I'll be returning to Dynastinae at some point in the near future to polish and freshen a bunch of things. Wish me luck in finishing something for everyone to try before midnight!