Getting Back Into Game Dev After a Game Dev Burnout Break
I had burned myself out around 2 years ago and finally pushed myself back into making games with a 100 day dev challenge with the goal of spending 5 minutes/doing one small thing a day. I am currently 40 days in and it definitely helped get over some of the motivation issues invoked with coming back from burn out. There were quite a few days were I quite a bit done because I got started and there were days were I just did the smallest amount to be able to hit the challenge.
In all of this, keeping yourself mentally healthy, taking appropriate breaks, keeping your life simple enough to keep stress down are all really important.
The Theme
I spend an hour or two after the theme was announced, a full nights’ sleep on it and a bit of time in the morning and just couldn’t come up with any game-play that I wanted to make that really fit it well, and since theme was optional, I just opted out. Did feel a bit weird doing that… but I was at a point of ‘opt out of theme’ or “don’t do the jam”… so I picked opt out.
It appears that even though you can opt out of the theme and POV made it clear that the theme is optional, many people expect the theme to be part of your game (this is based on the feedback I have got so far). And I suspect that impacted the ratings I got. Thankfully I am doing this for the feedback and self reflection and not the scores themselves.
Graphics
I might have found a style of graphics that works well enough, yet doesn't take forever to make and is something 'programmer' me can do. This is exciting.
4:44 rule
While I only ended up spending something like 16 hours over all, I came into the jam planning on following the 4:44 rule. I made a plan to make a hard cut at 4 hours to feature lock, which ended up being about 3.5 hours as the next feature on the mental list was going to take me more then 30 minutes to implement (and I had breakfast to cook). This gave me plenty of time to flesh out the game, make juice animations/SFX for the bridges (which have been commented about frequently).
Clean Code
I made sure to use some Clean code designs to avoid highly coupled code. While it didn't have a huge impact during the jam, It did make a huge difference with some post jam messing around with the code really easy as there wasn't any weirdness in the placement of different bits of code/connections between it. this also made making levels easier as I didn't have to deal with connecting different bits of the game play together as the different elements were passing data via ScriptableObjects, so they could be wired up once in the prefabs and the prefabs could be dropped in the scene.
Ratings and Feedback
As usual, getting out and rating 23-25 games and doing your best to give quality feedback gets you the needed 20 ratings on your game. I put a note at the top of my game page that feedback was more useful then ratings and I seem to have got more feedback then I have in the past. This was unexpected, but a nice to have.
Post Jam 'Fun'
Based on some of the feedback and something I wanted to try, I setup an Orbit camera (really simple/will clip into stuff) and a First Person camera and tried them out. And the orbit camera really did something to the ability to judge some of the jumps/platforms/etc. The First Person camera is playable, but might need a bit of design adjustments to account for the height of the camera (but FP platforming is an odd beast generally..)
https://youtu.be/oKOO1aPCM6I
Call to Action
I have my 20+ ratings and feedback, so be sure to checkout the games list and give love to the top smart balanced games as they are the ones that have been out giving ratings and quality feedback to others.
