It was Wednesday last week that I uploaded the last week of Brass City23, thereby finishing the year-long project. It was definitely a project I won't forget, as it was my first ever "big project" as a guy just doing it all on the side for fun, basically. I felt so content but also cathartic. I took a moment and just stared at the screen after I had clicked the upload button. But now, I've gotten a little distance from the project, and I said in the week 52 update post that I would do a postmortem at some point, and I think that time is now.

So what did I learn?

I learned I could finish such a project. It might sound obvious, but while following the Dungeon23 subreddit, I saw a lot of posts pop up over the year essentially asking "I couldn't pull it off, I got this far, how did everyone else do?". This was my first project of such a scale, so that I actually went all the way was eye opening for me.

I learned that actually seeing the progress week by week was very motivating. Looking back, I'm very happy that I made the overarching map file within the first week so I had a framework for seeing the progress naturally grow over the course of the project. It definitely kept me going.

I learned to look for unwritten rules imposed by myself, and evaluate if they were valuable or not. At the start, I felt only entries that came naturally to me was okay to write, but I realised that wasn't the point of the project. The point of the project was to make something a little bit at a time, not to be better at coming up with stuff out of thin air. Especially Sean McCoy's blog Win Condition really helped me get over this. After that, I still tried to come up with the daily entry by myself, but if I couldn't, then I wouldn't hesitate to go to narrative prompts, random tables, and whatever else I could think of to kick-start the imagination.

I learned that fitting a project of this scale into my life with work, other hobbies, family, and friends was actually incredibly stressful. I never really found a specific time of day that I could dedicate to the project, which meant that I wasn't really successful in getting into a rhythm. I had a long period where I got constantly behind on a daily basis, so I would crunch whatever I was missing during a single evening. This also resulted in delayed uploads, and was kind of soul-crushing, which obviously isn't optimal for a project I was basically doing for myself.

The project was definitely a balancing act between persevering and making progress every day, and being inspired to write something. Some days I had a huge burst of inspiration, so I would write the daily entry, but then I would write keywords in a separate place, so I didn't forget my ideas for the next day. I sometimes, rarely but sometimes, just wrote ahead and took a little break from the project until I wasn't ahead anymore. While other days, it was the hardest thing in the world to find the motivation, and a sense of guilty procrastination would creep in, until I cracking and did an entire week's entries the day before my self-imposed weekly deadline. What I think I did wrong, was that I didn't always allow myself to just write ahead when I felt the big bursts of motivation and time. That way, I could still just continue writing a thing every day, continue being ahead, but I could give myself some slack on the low-motivation days. I could have given myself a buffer. Instead, I did the opposite by accident, holding myself back during the days of high motivation, and crunched myself when I was behind.

I learned a lot from this project. The question is, what now? I feel the itch to make something again, but I don't think doing another project like this would be smart. Maybe it would be smart. I don't know. I have considered doing something a bit smaller scale, something where there might just be 52 things, so one per week. I also feel the call from other hobbies, so it's all a big question mark for now.

All I do know, is that I'm still very proud of what I achieved with Brass City23. I might be blowing my own trumpet here, but I did it for me, so I'm okay with that. I plan on printing the city map as a poster, framing it, and hanging it on my wall. It is full of mistakes, and I remember most of them, but that doesn't matter. That poster will represent the whole project, and that's what matters.

Cya around, and give making something a go yourself.