Devtober ‘22 – Post Mortem

State of the project:

I started almost with an almost completely plain project. What I mean by this is that the idea how things are working already existed, I also created most of the assets which are needed to achieve my goal. I worked already on the ‘same’ game before for Devtober 2019 but in GameMaker. So my goal this year was to port it over to Godot 4 and maybe extend it by some more features and other stuff.

What went wrong?

Even though I had a lot of assets for the game ready, even the idea how to implement specific things, I have struggled to find tasks to work on, especially within the second half of Devtober. I thought: ‘You have already a lot of the game set, so why need to plan tasks to work on, when you already know what needs to be done.’ This was maybe right for the first half, but not for the second one. Nevertheless, I continued to work with this mindset. Maybe this was also the reason for loosing interest in continuing the work in the last seven days or so. Usually I plan my tasks or the project in general with ‘Codecks’ but not this time and was absolutely wrong. ALWAYS plan your project!

What went right?

Before even starting with Devtober, I had some thoughts in my head that a lot of tasks which needed to be done will be a lot easier in Godot 4 than in GameMaker, be it the player controller by using signals or some other task. During the development of the game it turned out that I was right with my thoughts. The interaction between nodes or objects is working quite smoothly by using signals, much better than I could have done it in GameMaker where not such a system exists. I was also right about my rough plan about when I would have ported the game which was at two weeks and I made it in a bit under two weeks. So I could spend more time on adding other features. All in all I think I achieved my goal in this Devtober, which was: porting the game over to Godot 4 and adding some more features and other stuff. I’m more than happy about it.

What’s next?

I will freeze the current state of this game and I will continue with my actual project which is a Pixel Art pinball game. Not just because of that I achieved my goal of porting the game over to Godot 4 but also because I still miss some knowledge about Gamedev related things be it about ‘story telling’ or other stuff. These skills are needed to continue the work on this game. That’s the reason why I freeze it.

In case you want to be up-to-date about my actual project or this project in the future you can follow me on twitter or mastodon.

The End!