Devtober goal:

Because it's easy for me to work on my games every day, the challenge I've set for myself was making daily tweets with progress screenshots of Light of the Locked World - my current main project.

How did it go:

I did make a tweet every day in October with exception of 27th day, simply because I didn't want to repeat basically what previous 3 tweets said.

Days 20, 21, 27, 28, and 31 were without screenshots/images of any kind.

What went right:

My Twitter account got over 30 followers during the Devtober and my tweets started getting over 9 likes regularly. I also got a lot of work done. Possibly more than during the normal month.

What went wrong:

It's really difficult to produce visible progress every day - I had to work over 3 hours every day to get a screenshot. Towards the end of the month, I was already feeling symptoms of not having rest days. I also started working on key remapping towards the end of the month which was a mistake - it took me like 3 days to get to where I could take a screenshot.

What I've learned:

• Posts without screenshots get significantly fewer retweets and likes.

• Daily screenshot tweets are good for getting followers and likes.

• You need to have a rest day at least once per week or it'll make you feel tired and unhappy.

• Producing daily visible progress requires at least 3 hours of work per day and you cannot focus on one task - you must do side tasks that visibly change the game.

•  It's probably a lot better to post every 2 days - that way you can squeeze in rest days or days without visible progress, best of both worlds.

• For best results, it's better to get screenshots in the first 3 hours of work while you're not tired.

Tips on not giving up on your projects:

Semi-off-topic, but I've got a suggestion that it would be useful for other developers to hear.

• Work at least a little every day. Constantly making progress makes any task seem less overwhelming.

• Minus the rest days - during which you spend not even thinking about your project to replenish your interest in it. Doing and thinking about the same thing all the time will make it boring very quickly.

• Have a to-do list with the "Finished work" section. You have to become borderline-addicted to marking tasks as finished. To finish games, you need to squeeze as much satisfaction out of it as possible.

• Don't be afraid to trim your project - it's better to abandon the frustrating-to-implement feature than to abandon the project.

• Share your progress! Random likes and comments are a huge boost to motivation and it's harder to quit after you announced that you're working on the project.

• If new ideas keep hijacking your projects, divide projects into two categories - main project and side projects. Side projects - no rules. Main project - one rule: You cannot abandon it.  

• Side projects are a great way to get the annoying new ideas out of your system: Once you try to implement the supposedly awesome idea, often you'll realize how much work it'll take to make it fun and you'll probably want to come back to the main project that already has a lot of work done.

• Take game development seriously. Remember that it is hard and mostly boring work - you're not supposed to have fun, you are supposed to produce finished games. These tips might help you, but in the end, there are no magical solutions - sometimes you'll have to put a grown-up face on and do the difficult/mundane thing.

These tips have been tested in multiple long projects. Longest of them took 4 years and I still didn't quit, so at very least they work for me and I believe them to be correct.

Twitter account that was used for the challenge: https://twitter.com/DeveloperZuurix

I have also uploaded the updated version of the game - it's a bit rough around the edges, but should work

Thanks for reading and if you have any questions don't hesitate to ask them.