Lampyre development journal (5)
This week, we'll be initiating a few changes of pace regarding Lampyre's development posts and the overall articles I'm publishing here.
When I started writing on Bear nearly two months ago, I was not sure I'd be staying long on the platform. I tried to format Lampyre's development journal in a neat and expressive way - but the truth is, I spent an oversized amount of time tweaking tools, pages and articles, taking precious efforts away from coding the game itself.
My leisure time is running short these days and spending multiple hours on these posts is not sustainable anymore (and now that I look at it, it was probably not any wiser to do so before - but I'm happy I experimented multiple processes and learned my lessons).
In an effort of preserving my sanity and the quality of my work, this weekly post will not be an exhaustive list of sprint features anymore. I'll use this blog as a lighter development journal - writing out a short mix of the week's content, personal thoughts and reflections - as well as Lampyre's progression, of course.
The craftmanship approach
I readily procrastinate on some of the tasks that matters the most to me. Lampyre is an easy victim. I want it to be great, so sometimes, instead of actually deciding on a feature to develop and begin coding it, I'll read books, blogs and write three pages of notes just to "make sure I get it right". It is, most of the time, perfectly useless. Iterations followed by bouts of diffuse reflections are incredibly more efficient than endless preparations. It's called experience.
But gaining experience invariably means you have to deal with your mistakes - and that, is a problem for a lot of people's easily vexed brains, including mine.
In an attempt of working in a more efficient and goal-oriented way on the game, I'll be trying to drastically reduce the amount of tools I use and silence my online presence to this blog only.
The overall roadmap for the game stays the same. But I decided I'll be aiming for a playable and polished alpha version before completing all features in greybox. Key gameplay loops must be functional and enjoyable before expanding my coding soup to a larger spaghetti system.
By ditching blog and social media posting, endless reads and tool tweaking, I hope to restore and protect the only activity that really matters for this project: coding and iterating.
I'll still be posting progress here while returning to a quieter state of communication and let the real, actual game state speak on my behalf. That is what I mean by the craftmanship approach.
My very last fooling around session was spent to make this blog a little more like the beautiful Catppuccin dark mode of Obsidian (it seems to only work on computers though - sorry, mobile users). I love this theme and I'm happy it represents the mood of both Lampyre and me.
On tool ditching
Obsidian is still my go-to choice for dynamic and evergreen lists. I cut the number of routines tracked to five (coding, weekly blog post, daily concentration quality, meditation and morning pages) and stopped tinkering with the zettelkasten. It's a neat system for writing - but I found game design does not call for it as often. I still find it useful on occasions.
I extended pomodoros to ninety minutes periods with great success. After two weeks of this change, I'm beginning to stack up deep works sessions without the need for a timer. It feels really nice not to have a frazzled mind again - I guess I slowly took back on too much task switching and intellectual messing around during the end of last year.
Morning pages are still incredibly effective. We're going to need an extra stack of A5 notebook because leaflets are filling up fast. This ritual helped me notice how I was wasting time on productivity geek content instead of doing actual work, and why.
I hesitated to continue on blogging too. But I think I very much like the idea of a weekly trail of journal notes echoing Lampyre's progress. It's a bit of an accountability tool - with a very light pressure associated. As long as it stays very contained, it's ok. It could just be nicer with pictures (hopefully I can upgrade the blog as soon as I'll have more visuals attached to Lampyre).
That'll be it for this week. I am still working on the game's lightning mechanics, but I may shift my attention to combat and basic villager loop as they are supposed to be the superstar of my dark world. More informations on our mid-term objectives in the next post !