In case you missed it, I participated in the most recent Devember. The main idea behind the challenge is that you must spend at least one hour everyday programming something throughout the entire month of December. The ‘rules’ state that you must upload a dev log everyday outlining your progress. I’ve collected all of the links to my entries and put them on a single page to make reading all of entries much simpler. I also - somewhat painstakingly - went through all of the posts and added a next and previous link. You can find the page containing all of the entries here.

Overall, I’m quite glad that I decided to participate. Not only was it a big source of motivation for me to actually sit down and program, but also a good chance for me to improve my dev-logging skills.

I found out about a few really interesting projects by way of searching for a place to host the files on. I ended up using GitHub Gists. Although, since gist pages are a bit messy, I used another website which took the content of the gists and make them much prettier. I used draft.sx because of its simplicity and ease of use. You can simply use the gist’s ID to identify it, and continue to update the gist without needing to use a new url. For example, for the gist: gist.github.com/ajweeks/a0d6426870895cf5f464, your page is located at draft.sx/a0d6426870895cf5f464.

Near the end of the month I was quite busy with finishing up my final school assignments for the semester, which made setting an hour aside a bit more challenging, but I managed to find a way. I can’t say yet if I will be participating next year, it will depend on how much school work I have to complete.

As for what I actually got done during the development, I got a fair amount of work done on my latest game project: TM495. When the month started I had just barely gotten the project started, and by the end I had a decent prototype up and running. It’s still far from a fun, fully-featured game, but I think it would be even less complete if not for Devember. If you’d like to see where it’s at currently, the latest version can found found at ajweeks.com/TM495.

I also spent a fair number of days following Handmade Hero. If you are unaware, it is a project taken on by Casey Muratori to code a complete game from scratch in C++ using no libraries, all live on twitch. As of the time of this writing he has finished 242 episodes, each an around two hours in length - one hour of coding and another of Q&A. So far I’ve completed 10 episodes, and if he continues to host several episodes a week (typically 5 I believe then I have a lot of catching up to do. It’s a very time consuming thing to do, since I often pause the video and look around my code out of curiosity or to find a bug, and so one episode can easily take 2-2.5 hours. Although, I plan on finishing the series, even if it takes me 3 years!

Anyways, that’s it for my in depth review of my 2015 Devember experience. Hope to see you in the next one!