Devtober 2021
Devtober is a personal challenge about working on anything development-related a bit every single day. Between participating in Ludum Dare 49 at the start of the month and a deckbuilder of sorts I put over the month, there’s a lot I gone! Check out the blog posts below for a peak at what each day was like for me day-to-day, the postmortem for my thoughts over the month, or just check out the deckbuilder found right below!
The (Late) Devtober Postmortem
(12-01-2021)
So, here we are writing up a postmortem an entire month later. Getting back to this has been on the mind, but once you get out of the daily hustle, just relaxing and not having to worry about daily progress feels nice to come back to. Still, Devtober isn’t really over until you get that postmortem done, so let’s jump in.
While putting off writing up the postmortem, I had the super convenient opportunity to present at my local Independent Game Developers Association chapter (IGDA Ann Arbor) on November 11th, so I decided to give a presentation on how Devtober went for me, turning my postmortem into a presentation. For the guy who’s written a ton of super long postmortems before, this was a change, but a fun challenge! The bulk of it was just running through what I did in the month (i.e. a condensed version of all the daily blogposts here), but for historical purposes, you can give the slides a download in PDF form here [you can give the slides a download in PDF form here][/projects/devtober-2021/assets/postmortem.pdf]. However, slides are still just slides at the end of the day (and the recording is lost to time), so I’d love to fully write out my thoughts here.
What went well? What went poorly? What did I learn? Would I do it again? Let’s talk about it.
At the start of the month, Ludum Dare 49 happened! If I haven’t mentioned it already, that was the big push that got my to start Devtober to begin with. I had a lot of fun participating in Ludum Dare 48 about 1/2 a year ago, so when it rolled around while I was lacking any big projects to work on, it was sort of a no-brainer to jump on in. Last time I did the standard jam, so this time around I participated in the solo compo, wanting to see how far I could get all on my own. Look back at Wobbly City at Sea, it’s honestly pretty fun! You wouldn’t expect it by looking at it, but the immediate stress seemed to hook people in pretty well, at least according to the comments. I was pretty proud of turning a dumb idea into something playable, fun, with cute art, and even some music I threw together, all in the span of 48 hours!
The best part of the experience was finally finishing it up and tossing it out into the world. Once I got around to reviewing other games to get comments on my own, I had a lot of positive feedback come in, and when it was time for judging, I actually ended 25th for theme! I wasn’t expecting such a high ranking for my second time around, so it was an awesome feeling. I did pretty good in other categories as well, so good feels all around. If you’re interested, you can see more about the project here.
After those first few days of Ludum Dare, I moved on to what would be lots of small daily work on a card game. I started with a high and mighty idea about a card game where you equip abilities to reuse permanently throughout fights, but the reality of what what came together after that took a wild turn! I started with a design document that I never actually came back to, and after that it turned into primarily playing with art and lighting in Unity. If you’ve checked out all the colorful gifs below, you should get a sense of how things came together. In the end, the game came together to something that looked really good and certainly was playable, but not something super deep or particularly fun. Go give it a play through above if you’re interested!
So, what did I learn from that month after work on the project? The big thing was that this type of work style was not for me. After Ludum Dare, every day felt like a slog trying to throw together something that was eating away at time I could have fun or be doing homework, and that meant that every day I was looking for a tiny task to do instead of seriously progressing on ideas. Sure, the game looked great, but that’s sort of where it stopped since I never wanted to do some big-time back-end reworking. Still, I’m reminded that I am good with sticking to schedules (even if I did have to take a ~1 week break in the middle due to running a hackathon + exams…), and it’s still awesome to have something to showcase at the end of it all.
On the learning side of things, I did pick up a lot. I’m significantly more experienced with lighting in Unity than I am before (at least with 2D objects in 3D space) and I got a ton more practice drawing characters and working with my weird art style. Both of those are hard to improve without drilling lots of time like I did, so more good came from all that.
Posting on Twitter and LinkedIn was also new to me, but still exciting to do. I’m a perpetual lurker, so I haven’t ever done much posting on those platforms, so again it was exciting to try serious effort on them for once. I learned that it’s really easy to farm retweets on Twitter if you use the right hashtags and that LinkedIn engagement is CRAZY - I was getting over 100 (~150ish for good posts, ~350 for the most viewed) views on my posts when my network was only at ~100 people. I’ll be coming back both in the future for more project posts for sure.
So what are the final takeaways? Maybe devtober drained me a bunch, but at the end I’m proud of where I ended up and think it was worth it all in the end. Will I be trying it again in the future, probably not, but I learned a lot about myself in the process and will be carrying those lessons with me moving forward, which is something I’m happy to say. But hey, if you’re reading this, maybe give it a shot yourself! You never know where the month will take you until you go through it. I certainly didn’t expect where I went.
As always, thanks for reading, and feel free to read more below or play the games above!
-Robert
The last day for audio
(10-31-2021)
And just like that, today is the last day of Devtober! It’s been a long journey to get here, and by the end of it I’ve got some sort of working game despite all the ups and downs over the month. The game still has a bit of work to do before it’s ready to send off, but from here it’s just some small fixes and rounding some edges - stuff that won’t take super long and isn’t terribly exciting.
Still, just because we’re at the end today doesn’t mean the work finished up yesterday!! Today I finished up the one small feature every game needs: audio! sfxr.me is my favorite site for small stuff like this, so now I’ve got some blips and beeps for attacks, heals, and round end sounds.
See you tomorrow That’s all from me folks!,
-Robert
A gameplay loop
(10-30-2021)
Devtober is almost over, but I realized I was missing something important: a gameplay loop! Right now, when you beat an enemy, the game just ends instead of letting you have another go. Now, when you win a fight, the cupcake walks off screen and into the next encounter!
A pretty simple solution, but one that still helps the game feel out a lot. At least now I don’t have to pick between the robot and the meteor being the main fight of the game.
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Meet the meteor
(10-29-2021)
Since I couldn’t figure out a fun way to animate the alien I threw together the other day, today I opted to get the meteor into the game instead! For now it’s functionally the same as the robot, but it looks way cooler! Instead of just tilted back and forth, it bobs up and down while also constantly spinning. I also messed with the lighting a bit to make it feel more like a meteor I guess, but that could still use some polish since I probably need the back side of it lit as well for the full effect. Just don’t ask why a meteor is in a space ship again.
So, how do I plan on making it (and quite frankly, the robot as well) more interesting? Great question… I’ll be sitting on that one as I warp up this small slice of a game, as I’ll have to figure out how to answer it for the alien as well!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Less text than before
(10-28-2021)
After creating some new enemies yesterday, naturally, today I upgraded the UI instead! The last part of the UI that needed to be changed was the text sitting in the top-right corner. It didn’t fit the rest of the style, it would cover some other UI elements, and the health values were redundant with the health bars that have been in the game for a bit already.
To fix that up, I opted to switch over to some cute, small icons. The icons are a lot easier to parse quickly, stack up next to each other well, and fit the game a lot better than what was there before! Again, a fairly easy and simple change, but I think it adds a lot of charm that the text never could while still keeping things easy to follow.
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Some new enemy models
(10-27-2021)
Just having a single robot to beat up in game isn’t super exciting, so today I decided to concept some new enemy designs! Today we’ve got some round alien with crazy legs and a knife in hand, and on the other side we’ve got an angry meteor ready to slam into you while blazing red hot.
Now, how exactly do these both fit in? No clue! They’re vaguely space-themed and it’s hard to justify how they’re inside the space ship (well, the meteor at least), but I’m sure I’ll figure out some way, and if not, they’ll just be sticking around. Look out for them getting tossed into game tomorrow!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Some simple UI updates
(10-26-2021)
I decided to take it a bit easy today, so this time around I just updated the existing UI elements! We’ve got some new text backgrounds as well as greener health bars, and since now it matches the art style more than some Unity default sprites, it looks pretty nice. Now I’ve just got to figure out a font that fits everything better, and at least visually the game will be completely touched up.
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
An evil robot
(10-25-2021)
A cupcake fighting another cupcake that is dyed red with 2 swords in hand doesn’t make a ton of sense in space, so today I went ahead and fixed that! Every abandoned space station needs an evil/rogue robot, so now this one has one too! I think it fits nicely into the rest of the theme and art style, and fixing the pivot to have it move around the wheel was also a nice touch I think.
I also figured out how to fix up the lighting of the attacks, so now they’re not effected by the lighting in the scene like before. Now they’re nice an visible, regardless of where the light is pointing in the scene! A simple change, but one that has helped out visibility a ton!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Spooky Space!
(10-24-2021)
I liked the space theme from yesterday a lot, so today I tried actually bringing it into the game, plus a bit of extra spice. A moving space background and some touched up lighting later, and now we’ve getting somewhere! All together this looks like a spooky space theme that could actually end up somewhere!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Space and a Library
(10-23-2021)
After not being too happy with the cave/mine yesterday, I went back to experimenting with the theme again. After mulling it over for a bit, a space ship and library popped out of my brain, and that’s what you see below. I think both ended up looking good, and at least compared to the cave, we’ve got some big improvement with the drafts here.
Out of the two, I think the space ship has a lot more room to grow, so expect more on that over the coming days!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Suddenly, a cave appears
(10-22-2021)
While I’m sitting on what ideas I want to go further on for the core gameplay loop, I went back to some artwork! Today I tried out a cave/mine theme to fill out the background, and here are the results. It’s fun and cartoony, but I think it could really use a second pass to clean it up and make it more clear. The shadows in game are also starting to noticeably act up, so that’s also something I’ve got to attend to now…
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Now with health bars!
(10-21-2021)
Now that the attack animations are in game to add some life to combat, it’s time for some simple health bars to make it more clear! It’s a nice, small, simple change, but I think it really adds a lot for making the game easier to follow. On top of that, now it’s something to be able to style as well!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Some simple animations
(10-20-2021)
Getting back into the swing of things, today I kept it simple and went back to some animation work! Right now the game works and is playable, but it’s pretty hard to follow with nothing going on. I went ahead and added some basic popup animations for the attack and heal effects.
Even for how small they are, I think they bring a lot of fun life to the game, keeping in line with the art style already there. Now it’s just about getting more interesting effects in the game and going from there!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Back in action!
(10-19-2021)
The past week has been a bit rough - I got stacked with school projects, midterms, and this weekend I was directing MHacks 14, the University of Michigan’s annual hackathon. With so much on my plate I had to take a break from Devtober, but I’m glad to have the time to be back again! Since I somehow survived planning and running a Hackathon with my team, I’ve now got some more free time to breath, and I guess a part of that gets to go back into this month and blog!
Today I decided to finally sit and work on some actual gameplay - a simple back-and-forth combat showing off the mechanic of building up a list of actions you preform each turn. Only being able to choose between attacking and healing against an enemy that only attacks isn’t the most exciting gameplay, but it works! Now it’s all about expanding the gameplay and making it look all pretty.
For bare-bones it is now, I think there’s potential in expanding on it, so I’m excited to keep working for the rest of this month! We’ll see where it manages to end up.
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Surprise - more art concepting!
(10-11-2021)
Another long day for me, so back to programmer art I go!
Today I messed around with concepting some attacks for the game. Are they going to be magical and physical like a wizard or warrior cupcake, or are they going to be food-based to match with the theme of a cupcake? At the moment, I’m not really sure. Both have their fun ups and downs. As I progress further I should have a better sense of what makes sense for the game, through for now I’ve got a bunch of temp assets ready to go into the game.
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
A cupcake is emerges
(10-10-2021)
With a nice cupcake put together after yesterday, today I opted to actually put it into game!
Bringing in assets is nothing that takes super long, so I threw together some simple animations on top - some bobbing and goes faster with moment and a blinking cupcake over time. Again, nothing super intensive, but it adds a surprising amount of life to the character. Granted, we’ve got some problems since the character can’t actually move that much during play in a card game there, so this is more concept that content.
Anyways, enjoy the gif as usual!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
A cupcake is emerges
(10-09-2021)
Yup, we’ve back on concepting some art today, but this time with progress!
It was my birthday today, so with celebration on the mind, I whipped together a cupcake, and honestly, I love the results! A cupcake is really easy to draw, would look funny trying to fight, and using it to build a baking-themed card game sounds like a lot of fun!
For now, I think I’m ready to move past concepting and back onto the real programming work. Granted, I’ve got a busy school week ahead of me so maybe I’ll probably still be quickly throwing together artwork for a few more days. A decent bit into October, the game should starting to take form soon!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Trying art styles - A streak of 3 days
(10-08-2021)
We’re back again with another round of concepting. I feel like I could be doing some more work on the programming end, but for right now that’s where my brain’s at and I’ve been a bit strapped for time between other obligations!
Anyways, the below is what I’ve got today. I think out of these the card and bird might be options to keep trying moving forward. A card using cards in game sounds dumb enough to be interesting, plus you can do fun visuals with the front and back. Sort of same with the bird - there’s a lot of goofy looks you can give it to make the artwork fun.
So, expect more of the same tomorrow, but hopefully in more of a solid direction. :)
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Trying art styles - More random characters
(10-07-2021)
Continuing a bit from yesterday, I went back to the drawing board to put together some new characters. A snowman, a crab, and I even brought back my old friend toaster boy in a new form. As always, I think they came out cute, but still nothing’s really jumping out at me as something I want to really commit to as an art style, so it looks like we’ll be back here again tomorrow making the rounds! Oh boy.
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Trying art styles - Mafia Foodstuffs
(10-06-2021)
All game needs an art style/theme to guide it, so today I decided to mess around and play with some new ideas. Today, that meant drawing up an angry mobster carrot and banana! I feel like there’s something here with the idea, but it might need to bake some more and be something I come back to down the line. It is an idea dumb enough to work, so I hope even if I don’t run with it this time, I’m sure it’ll pop up again later…
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Playing around with lighting and shaders
(10-05-2021)
Since I’ve mostly worked with 2D games in Unity, lighting and shaders are things I don’t really have much experience in. So, today I decided to play around with them working with having 2D sprites in a 3D world. Check out the results below:
So far so good I think? The results aren’t super crazy since I was following a tutorial, but it’s a good start. I’ll definitely be looking into this kind of lighting down the line once I hop into working on a title more seriously!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
Starting something new
(10-04-2021)
With Ludum Dare behind me, I’m starting up something new, but I’m taking it a bit slower now that I have some time to breath.
That next project? A card game! I’ve been thinking about making one for a while, and the though of committing to working on that idea was what motivated me to start Devtober (on top of the conveniently timed Ludum Dare, which is always a fun time).
I didn’t do anything crazy today - I just got started on a design doc for the game. It turns out that games you plan turn out to be the best, so I thought that would be a fun start to the project. Specifically, I was looking to lay out the turn order of the game so that when I get into the programming I can have a solid plan. A bit more on why I thought that was important later as the project comes together a bit more…
So today I don’t have anything flashy to show off, but I’m really excited about finally getting started on the idea I’ve had bouncing around in my head for a while now!
See you tomorrow,
-Robert
The end of Ludum Dare 49
(10-03-2021)
And after only 3 short blog posts, we’re at the end of Ludum Dare 49 and my write-ups here. It’s real sad, but that means I get all my free time back and can move onto some more fun smaller projects. Woo!
Like I mentioned at the end of the previous post, today was about lots of wrap up for the game. I threw together some music using a bunch of free loops on BandLab, added in some visual stuff like moving waves & zooming camera, and the rest of the time was bugfixing and balancing to get the game to feel juuust right.
I ran into some issues uploading my code to github because it was angry about some larger files and the web build breaking, but I manage to get everything in with a finished game! If you’re looking to check out the game, see the links below:
Check out more about the project on the project page
See the original Ludum Dare 49 submission
By the end of it, I’m pretty proud of where I got! I found myself “testing” the game a fun excuse to time some time not working on the project after hours of grinding, and the stress of seeing the island tip back and forth is pretty fun. As with all game jam games it has a lot of rough edges, but that’s the fun of throwing together a game on your own. Hopefully you get the chance to try it out and see that I’m saying too!
Lastly, here’s a gif of the final gameplay I threw together for social media, but the non-compressed version because I actually have the file size support on this site. Neat!
That’s all for now, so see you tomorrow with some much calmer work!
-Robert
The game is coming together!
(10-02-2021)
Today I went off to the races with starting on my Ludum Dare 49 Compo project! I don’t think I actually mentioned that last time - I’m running to Ludum Dare as part of the compo, not the regular jam. That means all the programming, art, and music was done by me all on my own! I’ve been wanting to work on a project solo after doing a bunch of team work as of late, and Ludum Dare was the perfect opportunity for that.
Anyways, the game! In my down time during my shift at work today, I got started by redrawing all the artwork from the concept. It had a lot of solid parts to draw from, but the artwork had some issues. None of the images were drawn to the scale they would be in game, things weren’t as cleanly drawn as they could have been, and I had new ideas for what buildings would end up in game, so that’s where the effort went. I’m pretty happy with how cutesy all the buildings turned out, through in practice they’re a bit hard to make out all the details of given how smaller they are in game. A lesson for next time I suppose.
After settling back home after work, I got started on the core gameplay, and by the end of the night the gif below is where I was at! I stayed up well past that time working on the game some more, but a day in things were starting to come together even when I was busy and didn’t budget time the best. At this point the time I put in was a blur, but by the time I went to bed I got a bunch more work done, setting myself up for tomorrow to finishing balancing, visual flair, and audio. More on that on the post after this one I guess.
As always, see you tomorrow!
-Robert
Ludum Dare Begins!
(10-01-2021)
Well here we are - Devtober begins! We’re starting off spicy too since today also marks the start of Ludum Dare 49! We’ve got a fun month in store.
I had a long day of classes, work, and grocery shopping so I didn’t get too much time in before nightfall, so after writing this post it’s back to typing up scripts!
Anyways, this Ludum Dare’s theme is “unstable.” After some initial brainstorming I came up with an idea about a unicorn trying to save other horses from their stables in an attempt to “un-stable” them, but an interesting gameplay concept didn’t click with me. I got back to thinking, and then my current idea hit me: a game about a city that’s unstable in more ways than 1!
That’s when I threw together the above concept art! The pitch is that you’re the mayor of a rowdy town, and your job is to make everything run smoothly. You’ve got make sure your citizens are happy with the buildings you’re constructing, while also making sure that you don’t tip the balance of the island off with the weight of the buildings as to have it fall. There’s a lot of fun concepts to work with here, and I think it’s very doable for a game jam. I’ve still got to work out the core mechanics, but I think this is a great start to a rough and tough game jam. Hopefully by tomorrow I’ll have much cooler updates to share with the game actually functional!
I’ve got a long night ahead of me starting up the development, but I’m super excited to really get into the weeds and throw this weird concept together!
-Robert
The Calm Before the Storm
(09-30-2021)
Hi there!
All great months have to start somewhere, and for this October I want to break out of my routine to get back to working on fun ideas.
With school back in full force it’s easy to waste away time relaxing between assignments, but I perform best under the pressure of having too much interesting work to do. So, when I came across Devtober 2021 on itch.io, I knew it was something I wanted to jump on. I took today to mentally prepare and get this page of my site set up for what will hopefully be 31 other daily posts, so tomorrow should mark the start of something memorable.
If you’re reading this at some point after the month is over, I hope you have a fun time looking over the progress I’ve made here day-by-day! If I’ve done my job right, you’ll have lots of cool visuals to catch your eye as you scroll through.
That’s all for now, so I’ll be seeing you tomorrow!
-Robert