Apologies for the silence

Hey everyone, I hope 2023 is treating you well so far. I wanna apologize for the month long silence and explain where I'm gonna try to go as a content creator this year. 2022 was a really big year for my game as well as myself. I'm really proud of what's been accomplished, but I've also become more aware of some of my own shortcomings which have made actually shipping the game kinda hard. I know this can be a common problem for a lot of developers, so I'm hoping that sharing my experience here is a worthwhile endeavor.

Visual fidelity gained a massive boost last year as I got an art team that had more free time and more direction to help me craft the unique setting I wanted for the project. I'd say for the first two thirds of the year this was super exciting, as parts of the game which were really vague and pretty rough began to gain a real identity. Progress was going pretty well, until I had to go back and start working on levels that we previously considered close to being finished. The difference in visual quality between these sections and areas that were most recently art passed was extremely apparent, and this meant more work was needed. Visuals were far from the only thing that held us back on shipping the game in 2022 though, as changes to the game's design incentivized new approaches to level design.

Designing levels for a game in development is never going to be easy, but the challenge takes on a whole new life when you're also the one designing it. You'll find yourself creating sections to justify certain elements you've been sinking time on, only to realize later  they need to be reworked on even scrapped. While most NPC behavior and weapon balance has been basically finalized, the later part of 2022 did see a big update to how the soldiers in the game move and express themselves. Cover animations gave combat a different pace and incentivized me to go back and rework levels to feature a lot more crouch cover. I'd argue this  did make the game a lot better and helps my actual work stand out, but it also added a massive chunk of extra development time.

In the later part of 2022 and through out this yea I've been working on ways to avoid anymore time pitfalls. I might make a twitter thread on this in the future, but the basic list is something like this:

1.) Do any time and focus consuming task on a timer. A lot of people swear by working for 25 minutes at a time with 5 minute breaks in between, which I've had some mixed success with. I find that this feels kinda bad with tasks I struggle with (mainly level design) but it absolutely saves me from my worst tendencies when I'm doing tedious work that taps into my issues with hyper focusing, like getting some code to work or trying to get an npc to play an animation correctly. 

2.) Schedule breaks and chores. Rather than holding myself to any strict time for how long I work or when I work, I actually mostly seem to benefit from demanding I focus on other life things. Putting some alarrm on my phone to remind me to go take a walk, clean the office. etc has done wonders for my mental health and keeps me prodouctive during my break time.

3.) Plan ahead week by week. This was extremely useful during the big push to finish the game last year. While obviously we didn't make that date, for most of the time having a task list broken down for each week forced me to consider what was realistically doable and helped us figure out the scope of the game. Knowing what you're actually ok with cutting and what needs your focus is extremely important if you ever wanna be done.

So what's next? Beyond just finishing the game, which definitely needs to happen in about 2 months, I've been trying to think of things I can do to expand my skillset and promote myself a bit better. I struggle with writing consistently, so I'm halfway wondering if doing my own solo podcast or something in that vein would be interesting to my followers. I've enjoyed doing the func_podcast with Sean Noonan, but his schedule and our very different time zones has made that hard to do with any consistency. 

I'll definitely be looking for feedback on that in the near future, but for now I just wanna thank everyone here for supporting what I'm doing. It really does help keep me motivated, so I hope I can pay that back a bit this year with more direct content.