One day I was looking around on GameJolt and saw a Fireside article by a developer called @jacklehamster, entitled: "That time I chose to leave my gamedev passion on the side of the road; A story about my love and hate relationship with game programming." It's about his romance with game programming: his sections are entitled, "It was love at first sight," "The younger years," "The breakup," "Missing my first love," "An unstoppable passion," "Fear of commitment," and "The way I see it." Maybe this article touched on me because I was still fresh from a breakup I did not want to happen, and any inkling of romance could make me miss it terribly. But for whatever reason, this article (a very good one I encourage everyone to read) seemed to inspire a lot of thought in me, particularly about his need for game development to be a career, and his slight aversion to leave game development as "just a hobby."
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The bug I encountered last week was a deep one. Somehow, the game would move the player and AI objects when they are supposed to be stationary, and it appeared to be associated with the UI's button objects I was using. I say "appeared" because I really don't know what the source of the problem is. I spent a whole work night trying various ideas to figure out what was wrong, where the problem lay, or whether I could somehow ignore it. Sadly, every effort to try to thwart the bug, or even just figure out what was causing it, failed. To this day, I still don't know why my game was behaving the way it was.
Last week ended on a bum note, with a game that did not seem to be any fun, begging the question, "Why continue?" I continued anyway, and I'm glad I did. Unfortunately, though, this week ends on a bum note as well.
One thing I've learned in the process of developing my game is that there will be features that I am just not looking forward to adding because I know they will be more complicated than anything else I had added up to that point. However, these are the features that my game absolutely must have. By requiring that I work on my game every night, I force myself to confront these challenges and discover that I can in fact surmount them. And when I do, my game becomes so much better.
Mark Alexander started a series of blog posts a few months ago that I have read religiously every week. In his blog, he describes how he is making a game in GameMaker: Studio from start to finish, providing me valuable insight in not only tips, tricks, and techniques in game design and programming, but also the process of how to make a game. I have been itching to make a game ever since August when I started using GameMaker, and I have always planned to get back into design once I earned my bachelor's degree; I even paid for the full version and the HTML5 export module, and published the first game I ever made on GameJolt. The semester is now over, and it's time to make use of my investment. And like Mark Alexander, I will be documenting my process in a series of blogs.
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AuthorCurtis Miller is an instructor and graduate statistics students at the University of Utah. Archives
June 2016
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