This Dungeon Is So Cool!

Hey hi folks! The #selfcarejam came and went, and in the nick of time I managed to make a game! A very positive dungeon drawler, This Dungeon Is So Cool tasks you with finding your partner in the underworld and conquering demons with love!

This game means a lot to me for many reasons, and I wrote up a postmortem about it. Here goes.

This game took me around 50 hours to make; a little more than a regular work week. I wasn't the most efficient but I worked on it every day. The theme was self-care, so I set clear boundaries: at around 5 PM, I stopped working, and I relaxed. It encouraged me to get to work early! It also let me relax and enjoy my evenings, because I felt proud of the work I'd accomplished that way and felt I deserved the leisure time. (Note that we all deserve leisure time; I just feel so bad about mine when I feel I haven't accomplished anything. And I shouldn't! But I do.)

On the weekend, I ramped up my hours and took fewer breaks; it got to the point where I slept only 3 hours on the last night. That was bad! By that point, I was driven; I absolutely wanted to deliver on what I'd promised. In hindsight, I should've scoped better from the start. But now I better know what I'm capable of doing in a week; that was one of the best things about this project. I learned a lot about myself.

So I made a game in a week! Yay!

This was the first game I completed this year.

I don't talk about it much, but in February, I burned out. I was stressed, depressed, stretched to my limit. I went on medical leave for months.

It took me weeks to re-learn how to be able to relax. I spent months recovering. To help refill my social batteries I traveled, went to conventions, saw friends. There were lots of ups & downs.

This summer, I packed everything up and moved to Montreal, away from my family and hometown but closer to my community. It was harrowing. Throughout all this I lost my job, then got a part-time design contract. I lasted for a few months before quitting; I was burning out again. I needed to stop myself before it happened.

I've been doing freelance art here and there since, trying to get back into a working routine, but mostly staring at blank pages anxiously for hours at a time. This jam came just at the right time: it was meant to be low-stress, it was a week long, and the concept gave me a game idea I could do.

What I got out of it, in addition to working with wonderful people and completing a project, was the realization that I could work again. I had a regular work week! I was able to get up, be motivated to get to work, and relax guilt-free when the day ended. This is a big deal.

I also did all the art for the game! This was something I usually avoided or did in mediocre pixel art, to avoid confronting my fears. Drawing my friends as cute demons was also a revelation. I was quickly able to draw neat characters with few corrections and no stress. I've experimented with art for a while now; finding a go-to method to draw characters stress-free is amazing to me. I'm still smiling.

I also drew backgrounds, which are always very intimidating because I don't do them very much. But it went alright, and I got better at it!

Reaching out to folks to ask for contributions and representing them in a demon form they'd hopefully like were the biggest stress factors. But it went well! Not everyone could do it, because life happens - and that's okay! The result was a cute game folks like; that's what counts. 💙

The goal for This Dungeon Is So Cool was to make a procedural stress-free dungeon crawler that makes players smile, and I think we did that! The self-care part for me, what I got out of it, was finding a way back to a work-life balance that's healthy and validating for me. I have a lot of work ahead of me and I'm looking for more - and I'm more confident than ever that I can get it done. I'm in a better place.

So thank you for hearing me out, thanks to those who played the game, and thanks to #selfcarejam for giving me the inspiration I needed. 💙