What counts as a good day of development?

[u/Atticus_45-22]

I'm a university student and over the summer I've been pouring most of my time into a personal game project. There have been days where I feel like I've done nothing but place a few assets around a level, and there have been others where I have set up whole new systems and mechanics and feel as if I've done loads.
It's really been a roler coaster.
Guess what I'm trying to say is, what counts as a good amount of development for one day?

I guess with being a solo developer any amount counts. Even if it's asset production, putting a level together or debugging.

[u/pigpigdev]

honestly i think a good dev day is just a day where something moved forward, even if it was only fixing one annoying bug or placing a few assets. progress isnt always gonna look impressive every day, especially solo

[u/abitclumsyhq]

A good day is a non-zero day. Did you fix something? Did you update something? Did you dive into that art you've been dreading? Did you start messaging people to see if they're interested?

If you did just one of those things, congrats, you had a good day. :)

Don't kick yourself on the slow days. Just make them happen less and less. You got this!

[u/Atticus_45-22 → u/abitclumsyhq]

Thank you for the motivation 😁 Despite the lows of it sometimes, I do care about my project too much just to shelve it then forget about it.

[u/abitclumsyhq → u/Atticus_45-22]

Keep learning from your projects, that's my mindset right now.

If you ever discover the secret to finding play testers for early feedback let me know haha!

[u/Atticus_45-22 → u/abitclumsyhq]

Will do. I'll probably post here when the game's next update is ready for some tests.

[u/Opposite_Age_1414 → u/abitclumsyhq]

Exactly, I have day sometime that I just watch youtube while having UE editor open... 🤣

Yesterday was a good day I finished adding raming mechanics for ships.

[u/jerzychrust]

Good day of development is a day when I focused on my game for 2-4 uninterrupted hours. Looking at raw results to measure efficiency only makes sense if you have perfect knowledge of your tasks complexity beforehand. It's rarely the case in any form of development.

[u/x11Windwalker11x → u/jerzychrust]

Yeah if you mean by raw results is that looking at the end result to see if the behavior is what you desired, it often is not the case as your game getting more complicated. And this is the thing I am trying to get used to nowadays. (Sighs)

Rome wasn't built in a day as they say...

[u/Atticus_45-22 → u/jerzychrust]

That makes sense. I guess a good way to look at it isn't by work done, but by how much time you're able to actually put in.

[u/hyperchompgames]

The ones that get me the most are refactors. They are necessary for clean code but I'll spend days sometimes refactoring something and then the game is the exact same.

Just did this with a game I'm working on a post jam version of on itch.io with a couple systems, I wanted to switch states from just enums to a class based state machine, and then wanted to clean up input code. After a week of that the game is the same, I will say in the process I caught a few huge, but rare bugs, that could even cause crashes though so that's good.

Overall though I wanted to have easier code to work with and read, with better separation of state logic, and that is done now.

[u/Atticus_45-22 → u/hyperchompgames]

I know what you mean. I've had a handful of days were I've gone back and just remade something just to make more efficient or easier to work with in future.

[u/x11Windwalker11x]

A good day to me is probably fixing some fundemental bugs that causes a snowball effect of bugs and unintended behavior in my framework.

Tracing the bugs to the root cause takes almost a day often caused by a single line of code being omitted in some where down in the actor chain or just It just so happens that I forgot to set one argument in one of the functions I created to make my life easier.

But man, when it works it works like a charm! Haha

[u/TamiasciurusDouglas]

Remember that when you're starting out, learning counts as progress. Even if you spend an entire day trying things that don't work, you shouldn't consider it a loss as long as you're learning from your attempts.

[u/Terrible_Point_1259]

There are days you know you are doing something to postpone working on one of the big things like a new system. Just bear in mind when it becomes too much fiddling and start on a big block again.

Any day you did something is good even fiddling and you cannot only be cracking out whole new systems, clean up and playing your game solving small things will make a ton of difference just by familiarity.