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