My First Game!

Hi guys this is my first devlog and first game!

I wanted to make my assets entirely from scratch to learn animation and pixel art better. This took me in total less than 2 weeks. My brother made the music. It's far from perfect but I got one out of the way and more to come soon! 

My biggest lesson I learned from this was: simpler is better. Especially being a solo dev, I learned that the more you add-there is 10 times more work to do in terms of polishing. Every decision needs to be small and intentional. While there were days I did not work on the game and days I worked on it 14 hours straight. [it's 2:50 A.M. right now and I have work in a few hours]. I learned balance is important. Small incremental progressions is better than huge batches to prevent burn out and keeping me from hating the game. Sometimes playing the game itself ignites me to love it again. I love that my game is funny, it puts a smile on my face everytime I play it. It was so cool having a concept in my head, seeing the character come to life through animation, and then seeing the world come to life with it being interactive and it just made all the characters and story more real. As I grow older and get more mature I stick closer to my style and what I like vs being too heavily inspired by others. I never was someone that copied others because it was only when I created my own orignal ideas was where I felt I truly expressed myself and scratched an itch in my brain that lingered for days. Near the end of finishing this game I wanted to just finish it and I was trying to create a simple intro and ending as much as possible just to finish it. I know this is a short game but I purposely made it short just to ensure that I actually complete one game and go through the entire process of adding music, title screen, end screen, and publishing it. As I continued developing the game, I kept thinking of more things to improve or fix. At a certain point, I had to stop myself and define what a “complete” version looked like in my mind. Once I reached that version, my goal was to get it into players’ hands as soon as possible so I could gather real feedback. I developed a second game idea from creating this game. Next time I want to focus more on the game mechanic. While this game does kinda look like it was created by some 10 year old, I think the freedom of creating games early on with no reputation is that there are no standards and the fact that I am here right now publishing on itch.io is my first step to being a game developer. This hyperfixation problem I have when I have a new project is becoming a problem because sometimes I put everything aside and spend 14 -16 hours doing one thing and just completely locked in to the point I can't be locked out unless I have a pressing responsibility that I need to do. That is something I will work on. Although it's because this game was not bite size small and the game mechanic was not exactly small for a first game. This time I have a better idea of the timeline and scope of the project! I have been more accepting of the imperfections of my work. I create things that I want to see more of because there isn't enough of them. I found my new favorite medium of self expression. 

I am excited for my game dev journey! 

Thank you for reading this :)