One year retrospective

It’s been a little over a year since I started my game dev journey and almost a year since I posted my last retrospective so I thought it’d be time to post an update. I also collected some statistics that I believe may be interesting to other people embarking on their respective journeys, so I will start with those.

• Jams joined: 78
• Jams submitted: 36
• Shortest game jam: 3h
• Longest game jam: A little over a month? That’s tricky, I stayed in GDKO for 4 rounds but effectively each round was 2 weeks so I’ll claim 1 month from a couple other jams.
• Largest jam team I’ve been a part of: 18 people.
• Game views: I got 9,495 views across all the projects I have published (or I have contributed and have admin access) on itch.io
• Longest single script written: 1300 lines and 42k of enemy behavior (The Legend of the Fifth Sun)
• Most reused asset: circle_05.png from Kenney Particle pack
• Highest rank achieved in a ranked jam: I placed first (out of 181 entries) once.
• Notable prizes and awards: I placed in the top 3 for jams with cash rewards 3 times and I or the teams I was in got some kind of jury mentions also 3 times. All of these were great incentives to continue the journey.

I have a bunch of other stats, not sure what may be interesting for people so just ask me or suggest something to start tracking. I love stats and I am keeping a spreadsheet but I don’t really know what I should track there.

Anyway, back to the retrospective. After a little over a year I feel like I learned most of what I set to learn in terms of technical skills around Godot. I probably procrastinated by joining jams and now I want to get back to my original goal; make a game. I want to make something larger than my jam project, something interesting to me but also something that may be interesting to other people. There are some cool youtube videos that talk about making an indie game as playing a numbers game and recommend a few generes and aesthetics. I also wanted to run some of my own numbers on my own projects to probe where interest may be.

So yeah, I may pump the brakes a little bit and really go back to revisit some of these projects and the very original project that started this all; I am also looking for some interesting teams to join and I have a couple leads but nothing set in stone.

Hopefully I get back to writing about my progress a little more often as well.