Coding sessions, on tape

Posted Sun 27 Jun, 2021.

So I stopped recording videos of my gamedev sessions and decided that "the experiment" was finished, with some conclusions:

It was useful; specially now that I spend a some time doing remote pair programming.

It slows down your process, a lot; because you don't have immediate feedback, the pair programming benefits aren't there.

Very often, gamedev includes things that you don't want to show to not spoil the game; so these sessions work best when programming the engine, not that much doing design.

That was in August 2020, and now I feel like recording more videos, so I've started "a new season"; and three videos in, I think it is going better than the first round. Not only because I'm slightly better at managing OBS, but it also seems like I'm more inspired -for whatever reason-.

It isn't easy, but it has a bit of pair programming -with a rubber duck, perhaps?- and it is giving me an extra in the motivation side of things -even if I always thought of these videos as a byproduct of making games-.

There are a few things that have surprised me, and I didn't pay too much attention in the first "season":

When a video is finished, it is very likely there are bugs. Actually, I've found a couple of those by just having a quick watch of the video, and they are fixed now. But not *in* the video, there they will live forever. It is like watching a "slasher movie", and myself on the video is the victim -how didn't I see it?-.

Sometimes I have *some* time to write code in between "real life events", and it may not be the right time to record the session. So I found I'm conflicted: should I keep progressing on the game or should I hold those changes until I can record them?

I'm finding very hard not being extremely verbose, explaining things related to what I'm doing because the people watching the video don't have the whole story. Which is one of the cons I identified in my conclusions.

I am enjoying the experience. I feel like I'm learning a lot about myself, even if resulting videos have very limited success and they take time to make, I think I'm going to continue. The first "season" was 19 or 20 videos, that sounds like a good target.

There's a website with information about the sessions.

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