Sunday - 21 days left

Today was actually pretty good! Despite the fact that I felt like garbage the entire time, I have now added a flashing circle so that the player can know where the boss is going to reappear!

Monday - 20 days left

I spent all day today animating the boss when he's going underground to move. I have decided that he will always face forwards when he does this, mostly to save oh so precious time. I was planning on implementing the actual movement too, but I didn't have enough time this morning.

Tuesday - 19 days left

I did more than I thought I would do today! I have implemented the animations so that the boss now smoothly descends and ascends from a hole in the ground whenever he moves! I also realized that he was off center and fixed that in the room editor. I have also come to the conclusion that it's way less stressful if you think of what you want to do tomorrow before tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will begin animating the boss's spawning animations for the  other eight directions. This will stop him from sometimes spawning enemies into the wall, which will make him a fully complete (if slightly uninteresting) boss without major bugs!

Postmortem - 15 days left

Listen, I really can't continue doing this. 

Ever since school started back up, I've been incredibly stressed out in regards to my schedule. I did a lot to improve this. I cut my minimum daily goals down for all of my daily hobbies, and I had more and more time to relax as the days went on.

But the fact of the matter what that, no matter how much I cut things down, I was always equally stressed out by working on this game. In fact, cutting down on everything else barely made a difference. Every morning, I would wake up anxious knowing that I was going to have to work on the game in about an hour. Once I was done, the stress wouldn't get better. After all, there were only a dozen or so hours until I had to work on the game again, right? 

I was always stressed about working on the game today. I was always stressed about working on the game tomorrow.

So this week, I took a break. I didn't have to work on the game. I didn't have to write any kind of update or explanation. Of course, there was still stress. I was losing. I was a quitter. This is how it starts, I told myself. You promise yourself just one break, and then taking breaks isn't a big deal and you take a break every single week. Then, you just stop. Then, you fail. This problem was exasperated by the fact that I had entered a competition that required me to finish my game by the end of the month. Also, my analytics show that most of the people reading this are from that jam's page, so that's a lot of people to potentially disappoint.

Despite this stress, I was happier than ever. I had time.  It was strange, even though I had time before, I seemed to be convinced that I wasn't allowed to do anything fun and difficult. Making a new fantasy setting from scratch would be incredibly fun and I want to do it, but I just spent several hours being a productive person, I'm too exhausted to do that. I'll just lay around and browse YouTube because that's all I can do, apparently.  But now, I have free time to explore and embark on short terms projects that I don't have to continue every single day. Now that I'm not constantly in the middle of something or "recovering" from doing something, I'm a lot nicer to the people in my life. This is better. Truly. I want to feel guilty for not giving my all to this project, but I won't. I'm not sorry. I needed this. I deserve this. If I don't do this, my life is only going to get worse with time.

With the way I describe it,  it definitely comes off that I hate making video games. That could not be farther from the truth. Once I'm doing it, I'm doing it! The problem solving, the creativity, it's all so wonderful! But the resistance and friction that goes into walking to my desk and beginning to work on the game every single day was driving me crazy. 

Despite this, I am not abandoning this game. Far from it, actually. This could possibly even be better for my output.

On Sundays, and only on Sundays, I will devote several hours to working on the game. While, yes, knowing that I'll have to spend several hours on the game is more stressful than knowing that I'll have to spend five minutes working on the game, it's only once a week. It's not something I have to worry about every day.  I'll be using the Pomodoro technique to take appropriate breaks. Not only that, but the knowledge that I'm using it actually lessens my stress going into it. And since I'm doing it for hours , It'll be much easier for me to get completely immersed and in the flow when I'm playing the game.

While, yes, I do really like the day-by-day format that these devlogs have had up until now, I'll have to do this. Maybe I can still break them apart by pomodoros instead of days.

So, in conclusion, I'm sorry, I'm not sorry, see you next week.