TowerCreeps: A Devtober Postmortem

So, I participated in Devtober 2019 (https://itch.io/jam/devtober-2019). For the longest time I had the ambition of creating games, but I never managed to stay on a project long enough to actually see results. Recently I have been interested in programming a bit more again, and I was looking for ways to motivate myself. I thought that a game jam might be a good idea. After looking a while I found Devtober and decided that I wanted to participate.

I debated a few game ideas, and then decided I wanted to do a small tower defense game using the Godot engine. It seemed like something rather small, so it should be the right scope for me, and also I already had a few ideas I thought I could try out. So I set out to create my first complete game (since the "connect four" I did in ncurses a few years back).

What went right?

Honestly, what impressed me the most during the course of the month was how much I learned about Godot. Initially I thought I knew everything I needed to know to finish the project. As it turned out, however, there were a few issues I really had to work my way through, work with the tutorials and documentation and learn quite a few new things.

The other thing I impressed myself with was how far I got. The project isn't very complete, but still it is far more complete than I had anticipated. The jam, as well as openly communicating my progress on twitter gave me a sense of responsibility to the project. Even when I felt stuck I found the motivation to continue. Over the course of the weeks I saw my project grow, which in turn made me want to continue on the game. I'd gotten over the initial threshold I hadn't passed before, and it made me happy to finally reach some flow I hadn't managed to reach with previous projects (or rather ideas).

Overall I now have something that works, albeit some ugly unfinished game.

What went wrong?

So, here comes the longer section. Because there was quite a bit going wrong. There were a few things that I did poorly due to lack of experience, while others where out of my control. Unfortunately my schedule was a bit tighter, and there were quite a few days I didn't have the time or the energy to work on the game. I knew that going into the jam, but still not only did it hold me back, occasionally it started to stress me out that I had this feeling of having to work on the project, having a deadline, but not getting any progress.

Apart from that I lacked planning. I knew I wanted to do "a tower defense game", but other than that I did not plan anything in advance. During the project I had a few ideas for features, enough that I could probably fill another post with my graveyard of feature ideas (and maybe I will), but my lack of both time and planning meant that only a few of those made it into the "final" game.

Right now the game is actually not complete. There is no sound at all, no graphic effects, the game is not balanced a tall. I planned features like upgrading or repairing the towers, which I scrapped. The lack of these things means that the actual strategy in the game is very limited, almost nonexistent. Conceptually it is a nice little system, but nothing more than that.

What's next?

I honestly have no idea if I will continue working on the project. I mean I don't even know if I will continue game development right away, or move onto other things. I don't have that much free time besides university and my job, so if I do something it will probably have a lighter schedule than this project. I have a few ideas for something new, and maybe I will try that. And maybe I will revisit TowerCreeps in the future.

If I continue doing this development thing my next steps would probably be building some kind of brand. Currently I don't even have a profile picture on twitter. I also want to learn a bit about project management, and find out how I could better plan ahead.

So, we will see what the future holds in store for my development journey. And I have to say, I enjoyed sharing my progress quite a bit, so if (for whatever reason) you are interested in that, you are welcome to follow along.