In following the 12 months of game development goal that I set out to accomplish in 2020, here is the overview of the first month - January. The theme for the month was stoplights. In general, I feel like I did more learning this month than I did producing or creating but what I learned has been incredibly valuable.
In general, I didn’t work on game dev as much as I had planned on. A few things came up that took more of my time away than I had planned on - notably redesigning this site and an injury that made it difficult to sit at my desk for periods of time. I used my laptop quite a bit but the overall experience is much smoother on my desktop. Better tools = better workflow = better results. Fortunately, those obstacles are mostly resolved but I think it’s important for me to head into February with the realization that the likelihood of putting in the time that I think I will be able to put in is almost nonexistent and it’ll be important to maximize the time that I do have to work on it.
Lessons learned:
- Assets and animation can make a HUGE difference in terms how engaging the game can be. This is a little bit counter-intuitive because compelling gameplay is, in my opinion, a much more important aspect and the most important part to validated. However, in this stage of learning where I’m still nailing the basics, it feels so much better to have decent sprites with animations jumping over things or flying around in space. I think there’s a balance that needs to be struck where as the complexity of gameplay increases, sprites matter less in terms of validating an idea.
- Assets are hard. A goal for February and March are to do a couple of things - find an asset pack that I can reuse over multiple projects; and devote time to really focus on asset creation and animation.
- The little things that you think don’t matter, make a big difference in the “completeness” feel of something you create. The little things are vague but in general, I’m talking about things that you might take for granted as a dev or as a player: a start menu, a pause menu, consistent UI, how to play the game, intuitive controls, and so much more.
- Playing with a controller is a lot of fun.
Looking forward:
- Be more consistent about putting in the effort. Even 30 minutes to an hour can bring a lot of progress if I just do the thing.
- Upload things when they are done (or just when I'm done working on them), rather than waiting for the end of the month.
- Take things down a notch and focus on the basics more and less on trying to have unique gameplay (I mean, unless the situation arises).
Onward and upward! The theme for February is copycat. This is a little bit of an anti-theme in the sense that I intend to literally copy other games for the month. Why? Some of the challenges that I had last month were around assets and that feeling of “what do I do next?”. I’d like to focus on making interesting gameplay mechanics more this month and with this theme, my focus will be almost solely that.
This is getting a bit lengthy already so I'll have another post with links to the few games I worked on this month (3 in total) along with a write up of each game. Stay tuned!