Today marks one year as SoloGameDev fulltime, and as you saw in the previous posts, in these last months I decided to change the focus of how to develop my game Farewell, trying to enjoy the process more and building a more solid base. For that, I decided to advance more in the characters, the world and the story itself.
At this moment I'm in a complicated creative stage because I have the demand and feeling that I'm making little progress in my game, and in this post my idea is to talk about why it's not like that. Mainly, it is a way to show the reality to my demanding Taaro, but hopefully some of what I say can be useful to you. This post may even help me in the future.
The process
One of the things that I find most interesting about my whole Solo Game Dev year is how many different things I did, and how the attitude and approach changes for each one. For example, programming is easy, fun and bearable for me: I can program a complex functionality in a day without much conflict, but drawing a character is far from that. To draw I need to be very focused on what I'm doing, and even if I dedicate several hours to it, I might come out with only a part of the character. It's true that it's most likely because of my level of knowledge, but what I'm getting at is that my performance and ease of fatigue changes depending on the task.
With this in mind, I want you to think of me writing. When writing you have to be 100% focused. I can't write while listening to music, or listening to a podcast or talking to a friend. It's the moment where I have to be most connected to me. Not only that, but it's a creative area. I have to create something from what I think, so it's not an automatable task.
With all this then, what is it that helps me write?
The constancy
If anything defined me in 2023, it was perseverance. Besides Farewell, I have another game (SSD), but I also started learning piano, going to the gym, learning dance, cooking, among other things. What I most mentalized is that what matters is not the value I add when I work, but that I do it constantly, even if it is a very short time. My goal was that, to generate constancy. In most cases, it meant doing something every day.
Piano is an example that I like to say because I was proud of the low level I had before and at my current level playing every day. Here are some videos from when I started and today.
March 2023 - Learning Chords
May 2023 - First song alone
December 2023 - Now
I've seen people who play every day for 3 hours, and yes, those people play amazing, but I'm not those people. 3 hours for me is fighting frustration all the time, and eventually quitting. For that reason, my rule is to make it a short time that is easy to maintain. In the case of piano, it was 30 minutes every day from March 2023 to today.
If you asked me if it was possible to get to where I am with only 30 minutes a day I would tell you it's impossible, but that's the truth. In fact, if you want to start playing piano that's the best advice I can give you. Even if you think 30 minutes is too much it can be 10 minutes, my rule is to do it until I start to feel tired so as not to make it unpleasant.
So, how am I doing with writing?
Writing Farewell
In the case of writing, I initially set out to write for 30 minutes, but found it too exhausting. I finally went down to 15 minutes. Honestly, the picky part of me questions me every day, "How are you going to finish if you only do 15 minutes every day?". While I'm overpowered by that feeling sometimes, then I look at the progress I made in two months with only 15 minutes a day and I'm impressed. A lot of definite things that I didn't have before I do today.
There is one more thing I want to add, and that is that when I started Farewell exactly one year ago I wrote down the times I worked per day because I felt it was too little. These were the times for a week:
17-1 2:20hs
18-1 2:42hs
19-1 2:00hs
20-1 4:05hs
21-1 4:35 hs
22-1 2:30hs
23-1 1:30hs
24-1 1:30hs
25-1 2:00hs
26-1 2:30hs
27-1 1:00hs
28-1 2:00hs
29-1 2:42hs
30-1 0:30 hs
31-1 2:00 hs
As you can see, the average is between 1:30hs and 2hs per day. Not much really, since at that time I was not doing anything else (I had not started any of my activities). In fact, in February there were 2 weeks of 1hs. But eventually, in April, I had progressed so much that I was motivated to see how little was left, and there I advanced at times and speeds I didn't think possible.
Summary
I think the best analogy is to think that you are creating a house from scratch by yourself.
Building brick by brick, where at first you see nothing more than a couple of objects piled up to form nothing. But eventually, with perseverance and brick by brick a wall, a room, a house will form. Once the house is structured, once the most difficult part is already there, how hard can it be to paint it, to put doors, to put windows? Even if it is difficult, you can already see the house. It is no longer a pile of stacked objects. Now it is something that you built and the exteriorization of your determination and constancy that you can do anything.
And you?
What is your secret for the processes?
What do you find most difficult about them?
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