developing.team_size --

This blogpost is here to explain how this journey started and how it's evolving and continuing.
So, first for those who don't know; I'm Alvaron, 37yo m and proud father of 4.

I've been doing gamedev on and off for about 20 years now but kept suffering from imposter syndrome and hence never really uploaded anything. In the last two/three years that started to change, but that's also the period that I started to have bigger breaks in between dev sprints.

Fast forward to this year and my son has been doing CoderDojo Scratch track for about a year and he's really getting an interest in gamedev. So I've created a new twitter handle: gamedev_dad where we where going to work together in Scratch and Godot and make small games and do gamejams. Unfortunately it didn't really materialize yet, until the Unity debacle. Right after that Kenney (who you probably know and love), released an FPS starter kit for Godot 4.1 and we where thinking to maybe do our first project together.

It went ok-ish in the first days. Both of us being fans of DayZ and the survival shooter & extraction shooter genre our idea's went to a DayZ clone. But that's where it went "wrong".

His skill is about just enough to make simple 2d games. And although he had the insight to help me with the basics, he soon had to check off of the project because he was more just watching me watch tutorials and implementing the gained knowledge, or just watch me code for an hour or two just sitting there. That's no fun for him either!

So we've decided that I'm going to take Zurvive on my own and still work on it because we both still believe we can make something fun with just Kenney assets (one of our first game name idea's was Kenney-Z). He would sooo like to play it when it's finished and is one of my most flexible testers.

The Gamedev_Dad twitter will still be used to document parts of the development but a dedicated project twitter has also been created and I'm going to start posting on my personal twitter too.

But, with him leaving the "active team", we made an "exit agreement".
Once a month at minimum we dedicate one weekend to a gamejam and we're going to make a smaller scope little gamejam game.

Life dealt an ugly card though at our first one, the Godot Wild Jam for November.
A close family friend, 11 yo Raphaël, died in his sleep. He was such a dear friend of my son, and me. He was -I think- the biggest supporter of Zurvive after my son...
His mom came to tell us the news when we where only 2 hours into the jam. Needles to say we'll pick one up again later.

And it's partly for Raphaël that I'll finish Zurvive, at least to 0.1
But also because I've started to enjoy coding more than previous stretches and it shows it can keep me sane through the grief. A good way to escape reality right now.

This post is ending up more like a ramble towards the end here, so I'm going to wrap it up.

I hope you'll enjoy the journey I'm taking, both with Zurvive and Gamedev_Dad. And that you'll try and enjoy Zurvive 0.1 , just like I know Raphaël would.