March Warmup Challenge & Introducing dogeDIG!

Earlier this year I decided to take a few days break from GameDev – which turned into almost 4 weeks. After looking back on a very unproductive February I realised I needed to push myself and find some motivation again (and more importantly discipline!). So another 100 Days Challenge was clearly the answer!

With challenge start date being a good month away I wanted to make March as productive as possible as well. A couple of us doing this upcoming 100 Days Challenge decided to do a ‘March warm-up challenge’ where we would aim to hit our minimum 30mins of work every day for as many days in March as possible – just to get into the swing of it!

I focused mostly on my current work-in-progress (and still unannounced) game called dogeDIG – A game about being a doge and digging! (who would have guessed)

I came up with the idea for dogeDIG back in 2013/2014 when the meme-crypto-currency ‘DogeCoin’ took off. I played on a minecraft server where you could literally dig for the cryptocurrency itself and envisioned a Terraria-like game that could do the same. One quick prototype later and dogeDIG was added to my mental library of ‘games to oneday make‘.

A few years went past where I rarely did any game-dev at all. Then more recently in 2017 when I got back on the game-dev-bandwagon and started properly learning Unity I decided I wanted to see the game through to completion. The goal was/is to have it (potentially!) as my first officially released game.

Going back to the March warmup challenge: I’ve managed 26/31 days of productive game-dev throughout March which I’m quite happy with! I focused almost entirely on dogeDIG during this time: refreshing the first doge character design, working on learning more about shaders (and creating a decent outline shader), reworking the player controller setup from the ground up, making the first NPCr (non-playable-creature) and putting in a few hours of pain and suffering working on animations for the doge.

To finish up this post: I’ve been keeping an album of dev-log screenshots and gifs as the game development progresses. The album has screenshots that go back all the way to 2013 when I first came up with the game concept itself. Its interesting to look back on and equally inspiring to see the game progressing, I always enjoy keeping a progress diary/album of some sort. So below is a link to the album, which I’ll keep adding to during development.

Click the image below to check out the album!