Hey there! 🫶

It’s Pixel Symphony team!

We hope this letter finds you well.

These past few weeks, our team has been making plans for marketing and all, which have been progressing more than we thought.

Even though there are so many things to review, I have been feeling way lighter in a way. Probably because, unlike other times, we focused on interacting with other people, not even talking about networking, just about our project and having others to help us in things that might have been overlooked and that became some kind of hindrance in the future.

For a tip that helped us a lot, there is a method from a fellow Brazilian dev, which combines different aspects for a good game design. ​

Maybe as an individual activity, it isn’t as good, but with the whole team, it becomes powerful. To make everybody in alert and to communicate.

It isn’t a secret that probably most gamers and game devs are introverts, so we need to push a little more to become communicative and express what we think to others, since a group project relies on group communication.

One major issue we’d faced before, compared with our past experiences developing commercial games was to face overload. To me (cnd), it was really difficult to wear so many hats in the development phase, like being a producer, artist and project lead in a group of 6 and considering that everyone in the team was a game designer as well, and doing all those stuff while participating in gamedev programs and working as a freelance just led me to a predictable fate:🌈burnout🌈, which is a topic we can discuss further in a next letter.

So, to take care of our mental health we decided to move on by outsourcing the production area, so each one of us could focus more on our own work, and I think that was the best decision we made so far, hahaha. And now, looking into the past, “Stick Together!” is way more organized, and the asynchronous communication between each development area also improved, so everyone is on the same page. On the other hand, I think we need to find a better way to track doubts and ideas about “Stick Together!”, so they won’t get lost in the future - and that’s a point our production team also warned us about.

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☕ Coffee Break

Writing those devlogs/journals has been a joyful exercise! You don’t need to share it with everyone if you don’t want to, but devlogs really nice to market your game and review your project/work and check what went well or wrong and what kind of thing you can improve in the next week, month or in your next project!

If you’re writing for yourself, the goal here is not to stress out writing extensive and beautiful logs (unless you want to or it works better for you), but to look into your own work and think from what part you’ve got the most out of it. Revisiting your past devlogs can also provide a sense of progression, where you can have a quick check on the issues you had in the past and realize that they are no longer an issue nowadays in your current project or step.

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Have you ever tried to do something like that? How was your experience?

🪻What went well? What kind of things you’re doing well and that you can keep doing? Did you find an issue and its solution?

🪻What went wrong? What didn’t work this time and needs to be changed or is better to not happen again?

🪻What you can improve? What kind of things do you think you’re doing well but can be improved to elevate your work to the next level?

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🌻 Be kind to yourself when reviewing your work!

If you want to share your past review with us, send your thoughts to oi@pixel-symphony.com.br with “Devlog Letters June” as subject.

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Stay hydrated! 🍵

See you next month! ✨— Actually, in the end of this month… we’ve had an issue while delivering the letter to you, that’s why it’s a tiny weeny late, hehe.