And So We Begin (reupload)

I am re-uploading this from my personal blog (original post here).

And so we begin this devlog, one fine fall morning; a bit more tired than I should be at this hour; yearning for another coffee but forcing myself to get started anyways. The devtober challenge technically started three days ago, and I snuck a bit of work into my project over the weekend, but to me, today feels like my true Day One.

As a neophyte developer, my biggest struggles have been:

• Actually Finishing Things
• Stop Fucking Around With the Useless Stuff and Get to the Core Gameplay (You Twat)
• Work Consistently (Enough)

And so these will be the skills I’ll try to focus on, and hopefully demonstrating in these devlogs!

This brings me to my choice of project, which has its own set of pain points:

1. Is this project actually narrow enough for a single developer to make good headway on?
2. Am I passionate enough about this design to carry me through the boring bits?

My personal projects tend to fail on one of these two points. With that in mind, the first game I thought of to focus on was a platformer I’d been toying around with. It features, so far, an intrepid, anchor-wielding explorer (possibly influenced by a recent fighting game I’ve been playing) who has to wander across a desert landscape to find… something. I hadn’t quite figured out what yet, but the energy of the idea resonated with me enough to get the ball rolling.

A platformer is practically the ideal sandbox for the aspiring developer: the core components are mechanically simple (a state machine that controls different types of movements, with some knobs to tweak until you’ve got that feeling just right), then it’s just a matter of building some interesting objects to interact with, and mixing and matching them to see what ends up being fun. For learning game design, and not just game programming, it seems pretty much ideal!

But for some reason I’ve felt compelled to return to a project that failed spectacularly on point 1 - Death by Over-Scoping. But more than that, it was also a spectacular failure to focus my efforts on what really mattered when prototyping a design. A lot of my effort went into things like animating a bunch of sprites I knew I probably wouldn’t keep anyways, or spending hours on free sound websites to get just the right THUNKS to use when my enemies whack a door, … and so on.

Now, there’s probably something to be said for trying to evoke a target energy early, but did any of this help this neophyte developer learn the ways of the game designer? No! Of course not. It totally derailed the project. So why return?

On some level, I have absolutely no idea. But there’s always been something that’s drawn me to this concept on an emotional, evocative level. Taking my favorite parts of the survival horror genre… always being on alert for what might be around the next corner, always feeling like you’re about to run out of your resources, always knowing that the enemy is just stunned and it will be coming back for you… I still felt that taking these feelings, and trying to distill them into a randomized, repeatable experience would be worth trying again.

Anyways, I have the whole month ahead of me, so I should leave some amount of ranting for the weeks ahead. There’s quite a bit of work remaining, but hey! I have a circle carrying a flashlight, and that’s a start!