What I learned after 1 year of Gamedev and 3.5 games.

Failure is a funny thing. 

It was April of 2021 when I started my journey as an indie game developer, and I told myself that by this time next year, I would have made 12 games. It's July 2022. I have made only 3.5 games.

One of the many challenges artists and entrepreneurs struggle with is battling productivity. For the past year, I have been working on a head-throwing physics platformer (shown in the images), where many of the mechanics derive from concepts I learned as a young mechanical engineering student. However, I failed several times when maximizing my productivity and remaining consistent in game development. This was the case until I stopped missing consecutive days of game development. I have to give thanks to this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. I will not reiterate the book since this valuable information is best understood when you read it yourself, plus there are loads of youtube videos and blogs where people share their experiences with this book.

Despite watching several productivity videos from content creators, which were great advice, I still struggled to get things done. Looking back, I guess I wasn't at a high enough level to use this material efficiently. Making video games is hard, and when you are a solo developer, there are several things to consider beyond just art and programming. So organizing tasks on certain days of the week sound great in theory, but it takes practice. At those times, I haven't even gotten the basics of consistency. 

Now some attempts were better than others. There was a time when after my day job I would put 4-6 hours into working on either my game or marketing. Writing my to-do list each day helped me tremendously so that I didn't have to hold tasks in my head all day, and it was easier to transition between my day job and my creative interests. However, after a month and a half, I burned out into a crisp and couldn't get anything done afterward.

But even then, I was constantly searching for ways to help me be more productive, searching for more ways to save time to pursue my passion and making it feel more like a fun adventure rather than a mental burden. However, many of my attempts failed.

One of the core issues I had was trying to do too much too quickly rather than pacing myself and growing organically as a new artist. What inspired me to do this 12-game-a-year challenge was a blog post I read somewhere on the internet long ago, where the author built his skills as a programmer and entrepreneur by building 12 tiny apps in a year, and I wanted to do the same but with indie games. So why didn't I follow through? Maybe it was the pressure of adding video development logs each month or the pressure of expanding the scope of each project, or the fact that smaller games didn't excite me. I didn't get into programming because I enjoyed the boring small terminal programs about cat names and dogs barking in the form of text. No, I got into programming by trying to do something hard that I once believed was beyond my capability and seeing some of the joy (and frustration) when people tried my projects.

After reading Atomic Habits, I feel that I have more time. I feel that I can multitask and use some of these higher-level techniques to be more productive and make time for other things without feeling stressed all the time. I accomplished this simply by showing up to this every day. A professional shows up even when he or she does not feel like it. That's different from being a perfectionist.

Writing things down so tasks don't live in my head, and doing at least the bare minimum when even I'm not in the mood was vital to my consistency. Some days you are a rabbit in a turtle's race, other days you are just a turtle. I picked a frequency and just stuck to it while also fighting the urge to be a perfectionist and learning patience. I may not have made 12 games in a year but attempting it and then pivoting on something more long-term gave me a lot of experience points on things that may be less obvious to game developers or even other creators. It was a risk putting this much time on one thing, but I think it's paying off.

So after a year of game development, I learned to live and create with joy.

As corny as it may sound, this is my journey and I am still learning. I am not a master game designer, nor am I a famous artist personality. Although those are nice goals to have and to start a journey, what I am is simply an artist that shows up every day.

I am a game developer.

Thank you for taking the time to read about my journey. I hope my story was insightful for you or at least entertaining!

I plan to set up a Steam page for this game very soon but if you'd like to follow this project in the meantime and subscribe then you are welcome to check out my website where this blog post was originally published. (https://www.avonumgame.com/my-struggle-after-one-year-of-game-development/).