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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I slacked off for a week writing a blog, so this post actually represents two weeks of work. However, I can say that if there seems to be a lot done, it's not just because there is two weeks of work involved. By the second week, I realized I was on the home stretch and did a lot of work. This will be the last blog post I forsee for CBI.
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.
By the end of this week, my game finally had a working prototype. All the systems that I felt were needed were in place. The game "AI" was completed. I was finally able to play my game and see what it was like...
... It sucks.
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.
I think I was being somewhat optimistic when stating that I would have a prototype working by this week. I do have a tendency for optimism that I find hard to check. I am nowhere near a working prototype, but this does not bother me. I have managed to keep to a more important goal: working on my game every night for at least an hour, even if this does not involve any coding. For now, I would much rather develop the habit of working on my game than worry about where I am in its development. My strategy for motivating myself to keep working has been to think of one task I believe I could accomplish by the end of the night, be it adding a new feature or resolving some bug, then make it a goal to complete that task. These little goals keep me from being swamped by what is likely to be the biggest game project I have attempted to date, and what I believe could be a good game that challenges my programming abilities and, even better, is completely mine from concept to completion (and hopefully it will be fun too).
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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