Post Mortem

After much procrastination I finally finished my first game. I've been planning to develop my first game and start my career as a solo indie game dev... about a year ago. I didn't intent to use pico-8 at first. My initial idea was to learn how to use Unity and make some sort of game that would make me rich and famous. 

So I bought a gaming pc because I thought you needed that. A month after just playing COD on it I finally opened up Unity and started watching the tutorials which seemed simple enough but I soon came to the realization that this was gonna be a LOT harder than I though. After trying to make my first game in unity and failing because the learning curve was pretty high and was also juggling work and school... I quit.

After 3 more months of just using my pc for gaming I came across a discord channel for game dev using PICO-8. It sounded pretty cool so I bought PICO-8, started watching some tutorials and I got bored. I felt like I just had no starting point. No clear path. I wanted to make a cool game but the ideas weren't flowing.

Comes October and this discord announced that there would be a game jam for people who were making their first game (Devtober 2020). It sounded exciting so I signed up and quickly started brainstorming some ideas. I was excited. I WAS FINALLY GOING TO DEVELOP MY FIRST GAME. Luckily my more artistic brother moved in this month and I asked him for some help with the sprites (he was much better than I was at the whole art thing). He worked on the sprites for the first couple of weeks and everything was going good. I planned on making a platformer around the whole Día de Muertos theme. Suddenly only 10 days were left till the end of October and I had written just over 20 lines of code. Plus I was full of work and homework.

4 days before the end of the game jam I decided I would make the game simpler so that I would be able to finish the game. So I found a tutorial for a fruit drop game and I decided to make my own version but with a Mexican Tradition twist. I used the existing sprites my brother had made and after clearing up my work and homework I started making this game realizing I write a LOT of bugs haha but having fun laughing at myself for making such simple mistakes.

After 3 days of googling and debugging I finally finished this game. One day before the end of the game jam. From all of this I have a couple of learnings:

• Really do start from small, the important part is to finish something. You can worry about making something better later.
• Focus on your strengths. I wasn't very good at pixel art so I asked my brother for help. If you have someone who can compliment your strengths then ask for help and concentrate on what you can do (for me that was coding, I think haha).
• Only take the challenge if you truly think you have the resources to finish it. (Time and energy) If you're short on time then don't bother, you don't need to do it RIGHT NOW. What you're already doing is important too.
• Don't focus on it being pretty or perfect. In the last couple of hours I was churning out bug fixes left and right and not worrying too much about the aesthetics. My code is awful and I'm ok with that.