2021 - an honest review of the year by a game developer

2021 - A Review!

A long time ago!

When you're tackling a big project, such as writing a book, making a film, or, as in my case, developing a game, you can get overwhelmed by the complexity. This is especially the case in the field of computer games because you have to combine many disciplines such as graphics, music, programming, storytelling, and so on. I started with the project Leif's Adventure over six years ago. An unimaginably long time, in which I have to concentrate and motivate myself every day. In the first years, it was still very easy. The motivation was high and I didn't have to provide additional income because I had savings that I could invest. After that, the complexity increased year by year. Besides the development, I had to take care of work assignments to cover my personal and the costs of the project. I do not want to go into too much detail here, because it is primarily about the last year, the year 2021.

When will Leif's Adventure be ready?

I was asked at the beginning of the year when Leif's Adventure will finally be finished. Whereby the "finally" was mentally inserted by me, then I was pretty sure that it will happen this year. But there were further postponements and sometime in the middle of the year, it was clear to me that I would not be able to keep the start date again and that I would have to postpone it to the next year. This led to a lot of frustration, which became even bigger from month to month, as it became more foreseeable that it probably won't even be for a start in the beginning, but rather in the middle of the year 2022. So now I sit in the office between the years and ask myself: What was actually achieved this year? Was it a year of failure or do I just have to look closely to discover how much was actually achieved? And that's exactly what I want to do in this annual review.

I spent this morning reading through the commit logs and listing the major accomplishments. I was able to list 159 completed processes. These are by far not all, but only the elements that I thought worth mentioning.

For example, things like the following:

• New quests

• New outfits

• New features f. e. the new save system

• New characters

• Bugfixes

• New sound effects and music

• New levels

• And much more...

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The Highlights

To make the whole thing a bit more exciting I will create a few rankings. Let's go!

The 3 most complex features

3. Added Keyboard controls for the PC

The game should finally be playable with the keyboard. That was finally achieved this year.

2. Rework of the Options Menu

The options menu has been completely reworked so that the language can now also be changed and the music or sound effects can be adjusted in their volume.

1. The Savesystem

The save system was finalized and then rebuilt so that the save logic is more consistent. Everything that you have gained until the next save point is now lost if you were not at a save point again. This now applies to everything and not as before, partly so partly different. Especially for the Nintendo Switch, this was a big challenge because the save process had to be outsourced to an extra thread so that the save process doesn't interrupt the game.

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