Eagerly cheering everyone on! I am FAR too busy this January to participate but I may be able to offer help with assets in the second half of the month to folks who end up needing it
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Still making levels! I’m up to 20 complete levels I know a semi-final order for (the first 20 levels of the game), 7 completed puzzles that I don’t know where to slot yet, and a handful of unfinished puzzle ideas.
Sometimes it’s pretty easy to turn an idea or “trick” I’ve discovered into a concise puzzle, and sometimes it takes a very long time (3+ hours). I’m slowly gaining an understanding of the emergent behavior in my mechanics, but there’s a lot of ground to explore. I try to frame the time spent as “learning” time, but it’s not always obvious what exactly I’ve learned about level design. Sometimes there’s a concrete lesson, but other times it’s like, well, I have a big list of specific things I know don’t work.
My process is very iterative, and every few days I’m going back through the previous levels to make sure that they’re still ordered correctly and make little tweaks to improve them. I also go through my unfinished puzzles to see if I have any new insights or ideas for how to present the ideas they have.
The hardest puzzles to make are the ones that introduce a core concept. It’s hard to make a puzzle that teaches you something that isn’t too easy nor too complicated. Took a long time to smooth out the difficulty curve with non-trivial puzzles. I kept accidentally making puzzles that were too hard! I’m still not convinced I have it exactly right.
Still, somehow I’m cool with this process. I like puzzles enough that it’s fun to do for an hour or two here and there.
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wish I could ever get past the “I spent 6 hours and I have basically an empty project that I just made a mess in” stage of gamedev
is there like a trick to it
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Try to make the smallest thing possible, even if you don’t think that the end result will have any merit. Game dev requires a ton of different skills, and when you’re starting out everything is going to take a lot longer than you think it will because you’re learning at the same time. If you want to actually complete things, start as small as you can.
After you’re done, reflect on the process. Where was your time spent well? Where was it spent poorly? Where could you have spent more time to make it better? What do you like the most? The least? That experience and analysis will give you confidence that you can finish projects, and it will be slightly easier to motivate yourself next time because you know you’re capable, and you know what parts are worth it and what parts aren’t. What parts of the process you enjoyed, and what parts of the process you didn’t enjoy.
Completing things is a skill that requires practice; it’s nearly impossible to convince yourself that the unfinished thing you’re making has merit until you’ve made a few things.
If you make something small that you’re really attached to, then you can start expanding it. But you need practice seeing the big picture instead of focusing on individual pieces. And the only way to see the big picture is to complete something.
Game development is HARD; don’t beat yourself up for your perceived failures. Switch your focus from “output” to “learning” if you’re getting frustrated. I’m a very intuitive person and get pretty frustrated when I don’t understand something intuitively or immediately. But that’s OK! Game dev requires such a broad range of skills you’re bound to hit something that you’re not good at that you’ll struggle with for quite a while. Everyone struggles making games, regardless of what they’re presenting outwardly on Twitter or this forum.
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These are real ass truth bombs. The former quote is especially true for me after the initial hype of making something basic is gone. Because in the beginning I’m carried by the imagined potential of the game project, so I don’t get discouraged at all. But after that is gone and I have to do some actual grind work to make the mess into a game, doubts hit me. If I can get over that then doubts come creeping in again shortly before the end of the project. It’s basically finished and I feel like it’s complete garbage, doesn’t live up to the potential I saw in the beginning and isn’t worth anybody’s time or money, if I’m planning on selling it.
I personally only get over these doubts with a mix of don’t-give-a-fuckitude and clinging to what I wanted to communicate with the player.
To explain the latter: I make games that rely on story or theme more than gameplay and there’s always a personal reason for why I chose that story or theme. I want to help the player reflect on something in their life, I want the game to be “helpful” in some way. And when I focus on the miniscule chance that the game might actually do that for someone then I can continue developing it/finish it.
Probably it’s more like it’s helping myself reflect on things though.
I’d like to answer this but for that I’d have to know what your personal hang ups are when you reach that stage. Because your problems are going to differ from mine. It’s very subjective and it could be a million different things that keep you from progressing further
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I keep going in saying to myself “I’m going to do something VERY SIMPLE. If I get to THIS POINT, I will be satisfied” and getting to that very simple point consumes several hours, possibly even days, and I’m no closer than I started.
One example of a “this point” I had recently was a Final Fantasy 1 style movement system, just moving squares around a grid with that specific movement style, and for some reason nothing was clicking for me and I felt dumb and stupid
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I can only point out a couple of things that stick out to me:
It might not be the best approach to structure goals like this. Personally I’d rather say something like “if I work on this for 3 days and enjoy the work, I’ll be satisfied”. Make it more about the journey than the destination. You won’t feel accomplished for very long even when you reach that goal you set. But if you set out to just enjoy what you’re doing you’re winning even when, in the end, you fail to accomplish what you wanted. You’ll have spent your time well anyway.
Not gonna lie, this happens. However, when I feel dumb and stupid for being stuck on a seemingly simple problem I kinda feel angry dumb. Like, there’s something in that feeling that pushes me to keep going. I’m too angry to just give up on it and I consider that a good thing. It’s not impeding me. Maybe you just have to find your sweet spot of feeling dumb + feeling x (angry, curious, etc.), which keeps you going.
Also keep in mind that even the simple looking things can be deceptively hard in game dev! Nothing is really simple. It’s all hard and you’re a champ for working out anything at all, is how I see it.
Another also: This is to a big part just experience. Getting through this will necessitates that you try and fail again and again. At some point, after failing many times, you’ll score a win and actually get something done. That, then, can change everything. You’ll have experience to look back on. You’ll know what it feels like to look through forums for 3 days straight, looking for answers, trying out things and not getting anywhere, and then all of a sudden figuring it out. It’s an amazing feeling! And next time you get into a similar situation you’ll be almost addicted to the feeling of solving the problem and it will carry you through the arduous, uncertain process. You have to go through the motions a lot to progress. Keep throwing yourself into situations where you have to figure something out and you’ll get better at it.
Keep in mind that failure is not something that makes you a loser. Even successful projects go through more failures than successes. Failure doesn’t set you back as much as it prepares the ground for success, which then gets you a step forward.
I see it like with exercise. You work out and you make progress. Then you’ll inevitably hit something that looks like a plateau. Like you’re not making any progress. But that might be an illusion. You don’t know what exactly your body is doing. Maybe it’s doing work that’s necessary but doesn’t directly translate to losing weight, gaining muscle or getting stronger - whatever the goal is. You’re putting in the work, so trust that it’s doing something! You’re making progress even if it’s not measurable yet. Soon you’ll get out of that and see the results. That’s how I treat game dev problems as well.
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A big take away for me is that you have to enjoy the process of game dev. That will carry me through most of it. Like, I don’t enjoy everything about it but I enjoy most of it and often times I get “into the zone” while working, often times I have little victories that make me happy, often times I’m feeling like I’m having the time of my life doing game dev stuff. I certainly have found my “why”. I have reasons why I’m doing this, for whom I’m doing it and what I’m getting out of it. It took a bit to get to that point but eventually I got there
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This specifically is probably a lot harder than you’re giving it credit for. There are quite a few “wrong” ways to implement it, and if you fall into one of those ways it’s going to feel pretty impossible because the correct course of action at some of those points is absolutely to start over.
When approaching a new problem for the first time I like to research the shit out of it. Try to find as many varied examples and you can. Consider their pros and cons. When you’re starting out you need to build a toolbox of tricks. There are a ton of pitfalls in game dev, and you’re not helping yourself by falling into each one. You’ll have plenty of problems that you can’t find answers for. Take all the help you can get when it’s available.
Since I largely work intuitively I can get really overwhelmed and frustrated when I can’t intuit a solution to a problem. For problems like these, I now make an exhaustive outline of what the algorithm might be. I clearly mark my assumptions or unknowns in this outline and try to prove/figure out each one before programming anything.
Sometimes an assumption will be wrong and you’ll have to rethink the high-level strategy. Good! You’ve just avoided a pitfall, and since you outlined it, it will feel like progress.
This process will be difficult at first, but you’ll get better at it and it’s a great way to track “progress” on a problem that feels unapproachable. You’ll slowly whittle down your list of assumptions/unknowns to the point where you can be pretty confident your algorithm will work.
This unfinished algorithm above took me HOURS of work, and it took hours more work to refine it, simplify it, and figure out all the assumptions, but it represents progress where before I was making “none”.
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Made a cute direction-sensitive animation for doors today:
Looked worse when it didn’t care what direction you pushed a block into it.
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Spent a frustrating few hours today trying to figure out how Love2D for android deals with screen orientation. Probably easier to stay in landscape and rotate text as necessary, or make my own APK or something.
How’s everyone else doing?
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Still exploring looping rooms. Got sick of making looping room “setups” so making a looping room is now a feature of the editor. Spent a couple hours on this fucking nightmare of a level:
Red teleporters = send you to an new instance of the room on the other side, and green diamonds = walls that pop up behind you, so you can essentially go infinitely in each direction but you can’t backtrack. It’s stupidly hard so it’s probably an endgame level. I’m hoping exploring the limits of this idea will make it easier for me to make simpler puzzles with it.
Also made an animation for when you push something but it can’t move:
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Here is the horrible level above in action:
Turns out infinite mazes are kind of fucked up.
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this hurts to decompress, but it feels really good to look at. excited to get my hands on an original puzzle game of yours
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I added the push animation when the ghost is actually pushing stuff, in addition to when its pushing objects that can’t move.
Is it too much? I think it’s pretty cute!
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it’s fab
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Gate88 totally rocking it itt! Very cool stuff. It looks so cute!
I’m going to post an update on my game today. It’s 7am and I need to wake up first. I’ve been slacking! Got some stuff to show though. Don’t know yet if I’m going to make my own thread with [BD21] tag too… I might.
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I made a bunch of progress on the architecture for endings, using them to tabulate a score etc., but actually writing the content for them is probably going to be the hardest hurdle to get over.
01. THE ORDERED SEASONS
02. THE LEARNED SEASONS
03. THE ENGINEERED SEASONS
04. THE SEASONS OF LAWLESSNESS
05. THE JOYFUL SEASONS
06. THE ELOQUENT AGE
07. THE HUNGRY AGE
08. THE FRIGHTFUL AGE
09. THE AGE OF INGENUITY
10. THE AGE OF TYRANNY
11. THE VENGEFUL AGE
12. THE AGE OF EMBERS
13. THE MILITANT ERA
14. THE BOUNTIFUL AGE
15. THE ENLIGHTENED AGE
16. THE ERA OF THE WATCHFUL HAND
17. THE KNIFEBOUND ERA
18. THE ERA OF SCORCHED MARBLE
19. THE BANNER-CROSSED ERA
20. THE ERA OF THE GOLDEN SUN
21. THE AGE OF BROKEN CHARIOTS
22. THE ERA OF DISTANT STARS
23. THE ERA OF WALLS ASCENDING
24. THE ERA OF THE LAWBLADES
25. THE ERA OF HUMAN SACRIFICE
26. THE SEASONS OF THE MOON
27. THE ANARCHISTS' SEASONS
28. THE SEASONS OF UTTER FOOLISHNESS
29. THE SEASONS OF SELFLESSNESS
30. THE SEASONS OF NEW GROWTH
31. THE GOLDEN CENTURY OF VALDARAN AUTONOMY
32. THE TIME OF THE EMPTY THRONE
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I finally know what I’m going to attempt. I think it is feasible. I will say it is my first foray into Godot’s 3D and it will feature organ music.
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Contrary to my carefully laid plans, I spent the last week making a racing engine in ZZT with 8-directional movement.
This is for a Caves of ZZT remix-collab (like the one for Town that just came out). I could (in theory) spin this engine off into it’s own racing/driving game, though I’m not sure that’d be worth it.
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