Dear Sean,

If you scroll down to Day 5 I left you some pics of my little Kitten Karl. Cheers!

Day28 Project Retrospective

This was by far my most successful DK30 project yet. I think I can mostly attribute that to the grace and patience I had with myself. Looking over my entries there were many days where I wasn’t feeling up to the task I had planned for myself. In many of those cases I gave myself a break knowing my larger goal is to create a personally sustainable GameDev channel over the next year. When I give myself grace, oftentimes I would have a spark of creativity and inspiration later in the day and end up with great ideas or designs.

Over the past month, I was able to come up with a game idea that is:

1. Is a game I would find fun
2. Has a small scope for Art and Development work

Most of my hobby projects broke one of these two core principles for my approach to gamedev. Being new two this, I want to start with games that I can make in a few months, and then slowly increase scope as I get more experience under my belt. Keeping scope in mind will help me focus on the most important part of video games… FUN!

Where it started:

Where it ended:

It’s cool to see the progress I’ve made and to see the rough edges of the game slowly honed and polished. I’m excited to continue this project and hopefully will get that working demo out this month or next. Cheers! -Aarimous

DAY27

More or less an off day to go reconnect with some friends. Gearing up for a new week and wrapping up the DK30.

Day26

Spent the day editing the pong tutorial video. Really wasn’t feeling it today, but I had already planned out a video release for tomorrow so I got myself to treat this like work and just got it done. Going to try and spend these last few days of DK30 evaluating the current state of my game and what needs to be done to get a playable demo. More to come.

Day25

Paying homage to Pong by creating a long beginner tutorial for Godot. I realized I skipped over this feat during my learning process, so it was cool to create it. I’m going to take it one step closer and add “lasers” so the player can have fun shooting those at their opponent. Taking a small break from my rougelike team builder so I don’t burn out during the development.

Day24

Taking some time to expand the brain and learn how to make my own Godot plug-ins. They are very powerful, but I’ve never committed to a project long enough to make one. It’s always humbling to learn something new, but feels good when things finally work out.

Day23

Took a moment to look back of my Channel’s progress over February. Wow, I blew away my expectations away. But most importantly I stuck to my input goals and released 9 videos settling into a nice cadence of 1 devlog and 1 Godot tutorial a week.

I had no goals for subs, view, etc… but here are the results:

• Subs: 136 -> 412 ( +276 +303% )
• Views: 2,661 -> 10,563 ( +7,898 +397% )
• Hours Watched: 77 -> 353 ( +276 +460% )
• Impressions: 27,976 -> 110,029 ( +81,910 +393% )

I’m still blown away that anyone would watch what I make, let a lone this many people. I’m incredibly flattered and am enjoying this journey. I’m so excited I committed to this thing I’ve wanted to do for so long.

Day22

Doing daily update on this DK30 has already made this my most successful DK30 yet. Today I release my newest update devlog (Indie Devlog 1 Month In - New Sprites, Characters, and Swapping | Proudly made with Godot). I’ve settled into a decent format for these updates and it has created a nice positive feedback loop to push me to make progress on my game so I have something to share each week. This video has done very well thus far, getting a few comments from viewers saying they like the new art and the UI design is looking good. Those little comments really do go a long way to boosting my confidence, but I’m trying not to allow the success of one video to dictate my mood or my feelings toward my game/videos. I feel like that is an easy trap to fall into, instead I’m going to keep focusing what I can control and make a game that I would find fun and enjoyable.

I also came up with my game “elevator pitch”. My goal was to talk about what my game is, as opposed to talking about what games it is like or what genres it is a part of. Here it is:

You’ll build and improve a team to fight through a procedural campaign of encounters. Along your way, you’ll customize your characters by creating unique combinations of abilities that automatically trigger throughout combat. To win encounters, you’ll coach your team at key moments by swapping characters, using your player powers, or throwing powerful potions you’ve been saving for dire situations. But be careful, because your units have permadeath. If you manage to beat the encounter you’ll be rewarded with a strategic choice of new ability modifiers and of course mountains of gold.

Day21

Today was editing and B-role filming day. I had some fun ideas for B-roles and am going to end up with a video that I am fairly proud of.

Day20

Focused on getting B-Role for today. Only major progress was with a color adjustment to make the white a little more red and lower the value to give it a more retro vibe. Oh and I took a swing at my own character art. This is Blobby Blob.

Day19

I am very proud of myself today, I got the swapping mechanic to work and I think the UI makes it clear what is happening. Right now the art work for the player units is the same, so my goal for tomorrow will be to venture into the art of making my own temporary developer art!

Here is the new encounter look. Added a “Swap” button and you can see your team at the bottom. The active unit will have a darker icon showing their name and sprite.

When you click swap the active units get darker and then the team bar gets larger allowing the player to select a different unit.

Day18

Solid progress today on the unit swapping feature. I did a littler re-org to allow the player to have more than 1 unit and then made a quick and dirty UI to show that int he Map and in Combat Encounters. Now time to relax and enjoy watching Day9 die a lot in Elden Ring. Cheers!

Day17

Spent the evening working on the tutorial design. This process helped me define the what the basics are and what I can use as the “wow” discovery moments. My goal with the tutorial is to show the player the basics of the game, but then leave those wow moments so the player is like “oh shit, I can do that in this game?, that’s so cool”

Day9 has been stressing recently that games need to show mechanics with context (i.e. how Dying Light 2 did not do this). I’m trying to design my tutorial in a way where each system/mechanic either gets introduced after the player knows what to do with it when they get it. Example: give them a health potion after they have taken damage, and before a fight where they will take more damage and die if they don’t use the potion.

Another design principle is to teach a mechanic and then give a situation where the player can use it. Example: give player gold as loot, and then immediately send them to a store where they can buy some things they know how to use, and then some powerful things they can’t afford. My goal is to do two things, show them what the gold is used for in the basic sense and show them the value of the goal (50 gold gets you potions, but you need 150-200 gold to get something powerful). This will also have the side effect of showing the player how stores work. In my game stores don’t reset each time, the player will need to pay to refresh the store. So this first tutorial store will have an option to refresh the store (but won’t have enough to buy it). I like this store (as opposed to Slay the Spire stores) because this gives the player actionable information in the form of powerful modifiers they can save up for and then build around as they earn more loot though out the run. In Slay, it feels random if the store will be useful or not (unless you just want to restock on potions and or remove cards from your deck) and I think this is a missed opportunity to add more mastery.

Day16

No update for this project, I spent the day writing the script for my next Godot focused video. I also spent a solid 2 hour filming and editing my raw talk to camera footage. Overall a solid day of progress.

Day15

Today is a planned off-day as I released my most recent update video for this project and am resetting and planning out my Dev work for this week. Snowy day where I live so I booted up Frost Punk and this time decided to build a child shelter instead of putting those cold kidos to work (makes more sense if you’ve played the Frost Punk).

Here is the new video for anyone who is interesting in this project: Generating a Procedural Map in my Rougelike Game - Indie Devlog | Godot

Day14

Wow, 2 weeks down. Thus far this has been my most successful DK30 as far as setting a goal and then inputting effort towards that goal. Today I spent the day editing my update video that is ready for release tomorrow. Here is a sneak preview of my thumbnail.

Day13

I focused on cleaning up the edges of my map feature for the week. I now have made enough progress to make a solid devlog around my work. If I feel up to it tomorrow I’ll try and add a system so the player has to start from the bottom of the tree and work their way up.

Day12

Solid progress on my weekly goal of getting a game map working. I added in placeholders for both Shrines and Chests. Here is my progress update with new icons. Having a lot of fun with this project and I’ve build a good relationship of steady progress. I also have not yet painted myself into a corner.

Day11

Made some stead progress today as I worked on implementing a Slay the Spire style world map into my game. My goal for the end of this week will be to have this map functional so that I can place different types of nodes on the map. Right now I only have encounter nodes. But I will build some placeholders for a shop, smith, chests, maybe a question mark, healing shrine, etc… Heavily looking to Slay the Spire for my inspiration.

Day10

Woke up feeling much better today. I spent most the day filming my next Godot Tutorial. I had tried to work on this yesterday but wasn’t in the right head space. My prep from yesterday helped me step in and know exactly what I needed to get done. This video is now ready to be released tomorrow with solid thumbnail and another fun and fresh intro. Looking forward to spending tomorrow focused on Dev work for my game demo. Cheers!

Day9

Even though this day is on brand for Day9tv, I woke up in a funk and just don’t have the energy to get much done today. I was able to get a little editing and recording done for my next tutorial video. I also planned out the remaining work for that video, so hopefully I’ll set myself up for success tomorrow. Not to sit back and recharge by watching Day9 play the new magic set.

Day8

I spent today and the rest of yesterday editing my weekly Devlog for this project. In this video I tried to be vulnerable and show myself instead of just talking about my game. It made me fairly nervous, but my partner encouraged me to keep that part of the video in. She said that her favorite youtubers show talk about themselves in their videos and that I should focus on growing my audience full of people who enjoy me as opposed to the content I create (kinda like how we like Sean for him, and not necessarily because of the games he plays.

I went with a simpler thumbnail, so we will see how that plays.

Day7

One week update. When I’m programming or designing my video games, I often get frustrated with how little progress I make in a given day. Making videos for my weekly update has done two things for me. The first being that I have to document my progress each day, and the second being a drive to make progress every day so I have something to document. Those two things have created a really productive and postive feedback. Looking back over my footage I can see the progress being made and I’m super excited to keep this up.

I’ll also note that I’ve been paying close attention to burn out and have been ending my work sessions earlier than I typically would (per Day9’s advice). This has actually gone a long way to making incremental progress consistently over the week.

Game Update: I changed the color theme to be more flat. I might add back in some primary colors to add specific highlights as needed. I think some of the valuable info is lost by going black and white.

Day6

I felt better after my day off yesterday, so today I spent an hour working on the design for my spells, effects, and modifiers.

Here’s what I came up with: Each unit can have many spells. One their own the spells don’t do anything other than have a cool-down (in number of game ticks). In Order for the spell to do anything it needs to have effects, thus a spell can have many effects. These effects will deal damage to enemies, shield self (or allies), heal, buff, de-buff, etc…

The player will get loot drops when they win encounter, open chests, or buy item from stores. One of the key components of the loot will be modifiers (called Mods). These mods can be global mods (think slay the spire relics), unit mods, spell mods, or effect mods. At each of these levels the mod applies to all child elements. Here is an image to help visualize. When a mod is added to a spell it will be applied to all effects of that spell. If a mod is added to an effect it will only apply to that effect. I think this design will allow me (and the player) to come up with dynamic spells and they will be able to specialize their units. Say a healer unit that has 1 spell that heals the party every 10 ticks. It would be hard to get that heal off without the unit taking a lot of damage. So you might pair that spell + effect combo with another spell that shields the unit often. To achieve “often” you would want to find spell mods that reduce the ticket cool-down for the spell. This would result in a “tank” healer that you can throw out during easier fights to heal the team back up to full health.

Day5

Taking the day off to recharge and spend time with my little kitten Karl.

Here are some obligatory kitten photos. We adopted care in Dec from a lovely foster family. He is currently 7ish months old and is our first cat, so as such we are spoiling the shit out of him. Have a great weekend all!

Day4

I refactored the spells so that I can have many effects per spell and that the UI will dynamically show many spells per each effect. This should help me stay flexible as I can build out many effect types and then combine them to make fun an unique spells. I also added some new sprites. Finally I spent some time drawing on my white board in prep for tomorrow. I feel a lot of motivation with the project, but I’m trying to keep any eye on over working myself. Thanks to on of Day9’s recent streams, I’m try to focus on developing a health relationship with my GameDev and YouTube journey.

Day3.5

I got a solid base build yesterday for my demo. Here is my progress photo. It’s not pretty yet but it’s functional and Godot will automatically resize this layout if I change the UI artwork or sprites.

Day3

I haven’t made any major progress on the demo yet, but I did just release a video that I’m incredibly proud of. I tried to focus on making a video that I would find fun and enjoyable and you’ll never guess what happened… I enjoyed making the video and had a ton of fun editing it. My fun idea was to do a info-merical style intro. I think it plays well and has a few good laugh points. Here is the video for anyone interested. I have 3 hours of free time this afternoon so time to work on this demo!

Oh, I’m also super proud of the thumbnail I made. Making a good thumbnail really is a skill and I’m getting way better and making them.

Day0

I start counting a zero because I’m not a garbage programmer ;) I spent the first week on February working on on the design of my game. As Day9 mentioned in recent stream most games are 95% copied and 5% unique. The really helped me lean into some of my favorite games to try and combine some of my favorite elements into a game that I would find fun. The 5 games I’m using for inspiration are Slay the Spire, Vampire Survivors, Loop Hero, Hades, and Pokemon (my first love). For anyone who is interested, here’s my video documenting week 1 of my Devuary Challenge.

During the first week I also wanted to get a rough draft of the game made, but I kept getting stuck on trying to get something that looks good so I can share it with my Youtube audience. That has been holding me back from getting the bones of the demo made. I think it’s ok that I want something that looks good, but I shouldn’t feel bad for using “dev art” in the beginning of the development.

For the first week of DK30, I’m going to focus on getting something that works. If things good poorly, that’s ok. This is all a part of GameDev. One of my goals with my YouTube channel is to give an honest insight into my GameDev journey instead of just showing a super polished process.

Day-4

I’m kicking off a 1 Month Devuary Challenge to make a game MVP. I’m trying to document my daily process and then edit it together into weekly update videos. I’ve updated my goals with to reflect this series.

Day-12

For any who are interested here is my channel. I’ll be adding my goals once we get closer to the start. Right now I’m only planning content 1 week out.