31 Games in 31 Days (Devtober 2019)

I did it! When I first heard about Devtober my first thoughts were "well, I already work on my games almost every day, but what if I took it to the next level?" So from there I challenged myself to make a new game each day. Just how in Inktober an artist will create something new every time.

So typically a postmortem will consist of something like "what went wrong" and "what went well". I'll try to do the same but first talk about how I feel overall and how I actually pulled this off.

The entire collection of games is in one single Unity project. I just created a new scene for each game and a folder to put assets and scripts into. I used Gravit Designer for all of the visuals. It's kind of a freeware Illustrator.
I also took advantage of days with more free time, such as Saturdays and Sundays, to get a head start on games for the next day or two. I also reused a ton of components and graphics. You can see that I use the same striped 2d platform in half of the games.

How I feel about this challenge:
I've been into making games for a long time, and ever since I learned to program I've been making video games. I have this ever-growing list of app and game ideas and when I decided to do this challenge I thought it would be a great opportunity to knock some things off of my list. Well it turns out that most of my ideas can't be done in 2-3 hours which is all I really had each day because I have a full-time job and a family. So even though it was fun and exciting to make all of these games, it was also somewhat stressful trying to get things done in such a limited time. Overall I feel good about it, but I also feel a little burnt out.

What went wrong:

The first couple of days were really strong. I had a few ideas of small games to make. After the first week, however, my ideas were running out. So for basically the rest of the month I would come up with game ideas 1-3 days ahead of time instead of having a massive list like I had imagined.

The other major issue was of course due to time. Not a single game has sound or music, and the UI in every game is hideous. Also some games sounded awesome in my head but turned out to be pretty lame. Luckily they're all just prototypes and I don't mind that much if they're bad.

I also regret not having more reusable components such as UI elements and base classes. I did have some though.

What went well:

Probably the number one benefit of doing something like this is that you get to learn a wide variety of skills. I'm now much more comfortable using Unity and I feel like I have the tools now to pop out pretty much anything. I purposefully did some 3D stuff and 2D so I could gain skills in both.

Another great thing about this was that I got to explore different art styles, gameplay mechanics, and I was able to share that with others. I've open-sourced this so anyone can check it out to see how to do simple 2d or 3d movement for example. Or how to have objects move to another object or a ray-cast point. I think I'll use this code as well in many future projects.

It was also fun to post on twitter and see how people react to each game. The variety is very large so it's cool to see what genres and game mechanics appeal to different people.

So to conclude, I think this was an awesome experience and I encourage everybody to give it a try.

Here are some tips for anybody interested:
- Take advantage of weekends or days without work or school to pop out assets that can be used
- Create reusable components such as base class scripts or assets that can be colored to look different
- Keep the games as simple as possible unless you have time to do more

Here's a sweet highlight reel