Transducer

Week One Update

I have cheated slightly in two ways before the DK30 really started: I had a similar game made for a game jam and I had a few other parts ready beforehand, so I was already making the game for roughly 3 weeks before this week started. That said, I had major progress in exactly the things I wanted to go for during the week, so let’s go and see what I made.

First of all, a quick, 30s video of what the project currently looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnIVI0X9VN0

The main focus of this week was having a solid movement controller that is easy to maintain and expand upon, as I’ve noticed that in a lot of my previous projects, when the work stops being fun, the project also stops. This time I really took care to make sure two things are different:

1. Don’t rush the features just to see it working,
2. Focus on having fun in the research, exploration and making the thing, stop focusing on the goal itself.

This part of the challenge worked out very well, I had much more fun making the game and because of the solid foundation, adding quick 20-minute features for fun actually only took about on hour instead of the usual 10, while also bricking most of the underlying systems.

This approach also resulted in an unexpected, but very desired outcome: my work sessions are a lot shorter and I don’t feel like I have to have 5+h scheduled out of my day to get any progress done. This - in turn - prompted me to just jump into the project for an hour or two each day and made me realize that good progress can be made in smaller chunks.

In general, the next week is actually going to be a test of if I can reach the goals I set out for myself, but I’m also very interested in what will change in the way I think about work and my general approach to development.

This is what didn’t go exactly as planned, as I largely just did what I wanted to and lost a bit of time on wild chases instead of making sure I am coming closer to having a playable prototype of some kind. I will try to focus more on this aspect this week.