October 2019 Review

timbeaudet

  • Total income: $335.12 without personal investments
  • Total income: $3466.44 with personal investments
  • Total expenses: $0.00
  • Total hours: 106

In October there was a week long work-work trip that wound up dipping the motivation and concentration on the adventure overall. Committing to a task or project leading up to the trip was difficult as pausing half way into a project is painful. On return from the trip I was a bit sick and sleeping schedule was far off track. Missing several morning development sessions built frustration and annoyance that I was not on track. I was feeling a failure. Several days later things started getting back on track, but I don’t know really know if there was a particular reason. The LudumDare game jam schedule has shifted from 3 times a year down to 2. I don’t like this new schedule, or missing that third event, but did partake in

LudumDare45: Start With Nothing. For this event I was able to envision a tool that could be used for future game development and used the jam entry for testing it. A console emulator in ImGui with a command system that auto fills help pages was created. I didn’t get to integrate it deeply into Turtle Brains as I was hoping, but the concept is started. October was a higher than typical month for non-personal income as well, I am actually not sure where from aside from another large twitch payout. For a more detailed breakdown of finances, support Tim Beaudet on Patreon

This was the first game jam I’ve ever done entirely from Linux. The Linux experience went smoother than initially expected, though I definitely prefer Visual Studio over Visual Studio Code. It simply has more tools that work smoother. It isn’t that VSCode was completely incapable, though it’s intellisense never really worked as desired even after setting include directories. Running for debug mode was also slightly painful as it required multiple steps including ensuring to

save all open files with changes before building. Art practice also went fairly well. I definitely saw improvements in my ability to draw a circle and perhaps even some ability to draw a line or destruct some components of real-life into a sketch. However I still draw like a 5-year-old and get super frustrated with longer drawings. Is is easy to be patient and accepting of works that take 2 to 5 minute when practicing, but the piece that took 30-45 minutes were not much better but instilled a feeling of wasting time. There was no waste of time, you must practice and you must suck before you get better.

What was Learned

A Break Requires a Break When taking a break from the daily routine of streaming and gamedev, say for a work-work trip or other, additional time is required upon arrival to get back into the routine. In the future this will be planned for by adding extra days to the break where streaming/gamedev is possible if it happens and not to worry if it doesn’t. I think this will give a guilt free environment that doesn’t spiral out of control.

Custom Engine Development is Risky To be fair this has been well known and established in my mind from the time I started my

2D gamedev framework. However in my mind the risk was always “time time time” and “bugs that cost time”. Which essentially is true, however, because it is more risky some would-be opportunities close doors without looking further. The end result of the publisher pitch for Turbo Boom! is that there almost certainly won’t be a publisher.