Why I shut off all my social media for a week news

(learning Cascadeur animation software)

Hi everyone! In this devlog I'm going to talk about what I changed about how I spend my free time and the awesome benefits it had. I hope you find something useful for your own life in this article.

I took 3 days off throughout the the Christmas festivities, visiting family.
In combination with some lifestyle changes I explain later in this devlog, this made for a welcome, relaxing and uneventful pause in my seemingly never-ending quest, working on Assembly RTS.

I came to realize that the animations at my disposal for the infantry just aren't cutting it.
It would be best to give creating my own animations a shot.

For this endeavor I firstly tried animating walk and run-cycles in Cascadeur.
Even though I usually prefer Blender for 3D animation I thought that maybe Cascadeur's physics simulation and auto-posing features could speed up animating humanoid characters.

After learning the ropes I'm pretty sure that Cascadeur is a good fit for this task.
It's not quite ready yet. I'll show you the end result in the next devlog!

Up until last weekend I had been incorporating more and more social media in my free time.

My thought process was that by being active on social media I could find some good marketing opportunities for Assembly RTS along the way. This has been been true to a limited extent.

However, I recently noticed that, even though I didn't expose myself to the dark side of social media (drama, politics etc.) and preferred checking out what other game developers and artists are working on, it had an overall harmful effect on me.

Being exposed to so much superficial communications had a negative impact.
Once I noticed this, I made some pretty big changes on how I spend my free time.

I made the decision to log out of all social media platforms including Discord and YouTube and to not give them a single look for a whole week. Additionally, I forced myself to not play any video games in my free time, except for real-time strategy games.

So how did it go? I feel great, and there have been so many positive benefits!

I caught myself by surprise as I started writing music again in my free time. A most welcome change!

I have been trying to write music after work without success because of a lack of energy and motivation. Now that I have reduced all the elements from my life that satisfy a low-key addiction to instant gratification it felt very natural to start writing music again. Now wouldn't that be awesome? If I could write the soundtrack for Assembly RTS myself, in my free time!?

I also found a brand new liking for real-time strategy games.
Believe it or not, even though I'm working on a real-time strategy game myself I barely played any games in this genre during 2023. The main reason for this was a severe lack of energy after a hard day of work.

However, now that I have much more energy, I have come to enjoy the singleplayer campaigns of Empire Earth and C&C3: Tiberium Wars very much.

I actually never played the single player campaigns of strategy games very far.
It must have been due to a lack of patience that I generally preferred the multiplayer aspect of strategy games.

Screenshot from Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

Now that I feel much less like a dopamine addict I'm looking forward to an even more interesting and fulfilling future.

Who would have thought that cutting out all forms of instant entertainment would have such a positive effect in such a short amount of time.
I honestly expected that I would feel absolutely miserable without my 'fix', but after a few days often feeling a sense of withdrawal and boredom I now feel better than ever before.

I highly encourage all of you to try this experiment yourself and to cut out all forms of social media and other forms of instant gratification out of your life. You might be surprised.

From now on my plan is to utilize social media on Fridays only.
This is the day on which I usually post my devlog and occasionally do other marketing-related stuff.

I'm not sure how severely I should keep limiting my Discord use in the future because I utilized that platform to quickly gather advice on various topics whenever I needed it. I'll have to give that some more thought. Perhaps I should use old school forums for that purpose instead, to limit the risk of being distracted.

Please let me know your thoughts on this topic in the comments section!

Follow the Newsletter!

Want to get notified when Assembly RTS hits Steam? Click here!