Preface:

For several years now, it has always been my dream to participate in the GTMK game jam, and this year I was finally able to! I started my game development journey sometime around 2020, but not until now did I feel comfortable enough with my skills to compete in a game jam with a tight timeframe. Thankfully this year, the GMTK game jam lasted 4 days instead of 2! Although I had the arrogant presumption that even just 2 days would have been enough, life always finds a way to challenge you. Recently I have not had the best mental health, and so this jam was far more troublesome than anything I could have ever imagined, but I praise the fact that although I got out with something worth throwing at the bottom of a public-school toilet, at least I got something out. 

Challenges I faced, and how I overcame them:

Theory crafting an idea for a difficult jam theme:

I found the theme of "Built to scale" to be extremely difficult. I am not confident enough in my technical programming skills to justify any ideas involving the manipulation of game objects in-game. What I ended up doing is writing down a bunch of ideas on paper, cutting characters and items out then presenting a paper mockup of the gameplay loop to my brother to see what he thinks of it. Eventually I came up with the idea of being an immune cell reacting to the actions of their human (which ended up being ridiculously scaled down). I am still very happy with the idea, how it incorporates to the theme, and both the fun and educational potential of the game.

Fear of failure:

The fear of failure was a really big thing I had to cope with this jam. My episodes of low mood make it difficult to wake up and do the things I want to, which ends up taking a lot of time. That ends up making it feel like I'm always out of time to do anything, causing further paralysis and panic attacks. 

Although I think I have a lot more to improve in these areas, I can say that what helped me was: 

1. Taking deeper, slower beaths. A good way to make sure you're going slow enough is to breathe from the stomach. This helps soothe anxiety and primes the prefrontal cortex for more rational thinking.

2. Another thing which helped was constantly adjusting and re-thinking the scope. Every day I had to change the scope of the project to the paint where it is unrecognizable and unintegratable with most of the earlier project ideas, code, and assets. As tough as sacrificing those may be, it was necessary for me to meet the deadline. 

3. Lastly, I always underappreciate the value of just sitting down and saying "I'm gonna do something". Sometimes, that would help take me from a distraught mood to a high blazing down lines of code, paragraphs at a time. Sometimes (at university for example), I wouldn't be able to focus completely on art, or code (which were at the top of the priority list at the time), but I would push myself to at least get something done, and it was there I got to get some sound effects and music. They aren't the best, but later down the line 1 hour before submission it makes a difference 🤣

Above all, this jam will probably be a push for me to get better and better for game development. Coming into this, finishing a game was important to me because I want to use the GMTK game jam as a yearly measure of my personal ability. There's a lot I know I can do better in.

Anyways this devlog was more for me than for anyone reading but if you have read all this, thank you and have a good day- heck, a good week or month or year while we're at it! See you next time. 😎

Edit: AHHHHHH WHY DOES THE GAME JUST END AFTER 2 WAVES??? NOOOOO