End of July Progress Report: I have taken a break

My goal for July was to take a break from programming my game and not do any programming outside of work! I was tired every day from my day job and forcing myself to work on the game was getting more and more difficult, so I wanted a break.

Did I meet my goal?

Yes! I did almost zero programming in July outside of work!

What did I learn?

I learned quite a few things, actually. First, I was reminded of the importance of pacing myself and being flexible with my schedule. I've actually delayed making this post for so long because I was going to Otakon this year and it just seemed like I didn't have the time for writing this up until today. Going forward, I intend to set myself a flexible schedule that still has some hard requirements that'll force me to keep making progress.

Also, by taking a break I allowed myself a lot of time to reflect on my project and consider it from different angles for a long period of time without having to fret about whatever I was changing that week. It has made me reconsider the worth of the voice mimicking in my game and later this month I'm planning on reviewing the code for it entirely and either removing the feature or streamlining it further.

Finally, I was reminded of the importance of doing things other than playing and making games. I haven't watched a lot of TV or read books lately. Being at Otakon and sitting down to watch some shows I hadn't seen before reminded me of how much you can learn just by doing things that aren't "working on your project." I need to block out time specifically for this each week as well as blocking out time for working on my game. It feels awkward, or even wrong to be spending time on "frivolous" things that don't contribute to my project goals, but it's super helpful overall.

Goals for August

This month, all I want to do is focus on level design. When I think about how to make a level for my game right now, I'm frankly just not sure where to start. How do I keep levels from feeling boring? How do I make levels interesting? How should I make levels at all? By the end of August I want to have some sort of answer for those questions, however incomplete, and also have at least started working on 5 different levels for my game.

End of June Progress Report: I'm taking a break

This'll be a short post.

I'm taking a break from game development for the month, even though it's killing me to do so. My day job has been really stressful and consequently I haven't had a lot of time to do game development in my free time. This has really sucked, but there's been no way around it and I keep beating myself up about not doing more, but that really doesn't help with my stress levels (and I would like to note here that I feel I am typically quite good at dealing with stress).

I'm feeling burnt out and work isn't going to be less stressful for another month at least, so I'm giving myself permission to not work on game development. In fact, I'm going to force myself not to work on it with the assumption that this break is just for the month of July and that this will help me be more energized to do the work in August.

No small part of me worries that not being able to handle this all at the same time means that I could never make it in the games industry. However, I've been reminding myself that if I were in the games industry, I (probably) wouldn't be working literally all day for six days of the week.

I don't know. Guess this is just another part of my grand experiment. Feeling kind of down this month.

On a positive note, I finished my first playthrough of Analogue: A Hate Story tonight and it was great! Also, I'll have some more things to post about the MSU-1 soon, so hopefully people will look forward to that; especially the people who have been posting in the comments of part 2 of that article series!

End of May Progress Report: Core Features

Earlier in the month, I made a decision to really challenge myself and make my Ludum Dare 29 entry ready for a full release on PC and/or Android by the end of June. I also posted a list of things I wanted to do to the game before I released it. I've reorganized my list into several categories of descending importance: Essential, Secondary, Polish and Dead Last items.

What's done

I don't have as much done this month as I'd like because of things at my day job cropping up and causing a ton of stress. However, here's what I do have done (and keep in mind that I've omitted a lot of technical detail and additional notes under each of these items):

Essential

• Make rooms you can go into from the hallway
• Add suspicion for the NPCs when you are in an infected host
• Add voice mimicing mechanics

Adding rooms (and a method of travelling between rooms) is a big upgrade for my game since the ludum dare version is nothing but a series of hallways. Now I can make much more interesting mazes that can be more convincing as a science facility.

NPCs will now act with suspicion when they see you. If you're outside of a human host, you get recognized as an escaped alien parasite instantly and they will react appropriately (Scientists will attempt to run away and call guards and guards will attempt to murder you on sight). However, if you're inside a human host when you're spotted by an NPC they'll stop and consider you. Perhaps your eyes aren't aligned quite right, or perhaps your human host is twitching oddly, but eventually any NPC looking at you will notice something is wrong, assume you're an alien, and react appropriately.

The coolest feature, in my opinion, that I've added is the ability for the player to hear certain phrases spoken by NPCs and then, when inside a human host, parrot those phrases back. So, for example, early on you can learn to say "Hello." This comes in handy when a guard or scientist is suspicious of you but has not yet decided you are an alien in disguise, you can say "Hello" to them and they will respond back with something like "Oh, hey Jim." and their suspicion is eased.

What's left to do

There's plenty left to do from my list, but near the top of the list is creating a method of deciding what thing the player wants to say when they're inside a human. I've been working on this, but Unity's GUI tools have a long history of not being great. Recently, however, there was an announcement about new GUI tools that are coming out some time this summer. In light of that, I'm going to write a quick hack to get around not having a UI and then try to put it off for as long as possible in the hope that I can use the new GUI system.

Here's the rest of the to do list (again, abridged):

Essential

• Make a menu or something to set the voice clips
• Add switches that toggle doors on and off
• Remake the first two levels with the new stuff (e.g. rooms)
• Add at least three new levels

Secondary

• Clean up my code base
• Make new art for all the new levels
• Fix the resolution on the windows build
• Add touch screen controls
• Make an animation for background doors opening and closing
• Make an animation for hall doors opening and closing
• Make animations for characters walking into and out of doors in the background and make them play

Polish

• Add music
• Add sound effects
• Add a menu
• Add an ending
• Fix movement bugs
• Fix guard animations
• Tighten up the elevator script
• Make new art to make the levels feel lived in
• Add more voice work
• Maybe add a sound effect and a start-up time to bursting so that you can't do it on accident?
• Fix Bugs

Dead Last

• Test all my new levels and mechanics
• Release the game for $1 on PC
• Release the game for $1 on Android and iOS

Goals for June

I'm going to stick to my guns for now and try to knock out all of these things by the end of June. I am, however, very doubtful that this will happen. I may miss my deadline and this will take until sometime in July. Releasing this game is an important step in my quest to get a job in game development.

Next month should also have screenshots since, as soon as I'm done with this post, I'm starting on reworking levels. The changes this past month weren't very visual.

A Change of Plan

I work best on a tight deadline and I acknowledged as much during my last blog post. That fact has been stirring around in my head for a few days now and I think I'm going to do something crazy and change my May goals.

Below is a list of all the work I have left to do on my Ludum Dare 29 game, Beneath Your Skin (not necessarily in this order):
Add music
Add sound effects
Add more voice work
Add an ending
Fix movement bugs
Fix the resolution on the windows build
Add suspicion for the NPCs when you are in an infected host
Add voice mimicing mechanics
Add at least three new levels
Add touch screen controls
Make new art for all the new levels
Make new art to make the levels feel lived in
Make rooms you can go into from the hallway
Tighten up the elevator script
Fix guard animations
Test all my new levels and mechanics
Release the game for $1 on PC
Release the game for $1 on Android and iOS

My new goal for May is to do at least half of that list. My goal for June is to do the rest.

Why the rush? I've known for a while that the best way for me to get a job making video games is to just start making video games. The problem is that I'm not finishing anything. To fix that, I'm going to do something crazy and just devote as much as my free time as I can handle to just shipping a game. The game will probably not be as good as it could be, but it will be something I feel good about releasing to the public and that will have to be enough.

Release or bust.

A New Year and New Goals

Last year, I sat down and decided that I was going to release one RPG per month. They didn't have to be complete games and they didn't have to be very good, but they had to be kind of done and I had to release them. Looking back, it uh... well, it went incredibly poorly. I released two games, one of which wasn't even an RPG, and made a lot of progress on another, but mostly I was just feeling frustrated with myself. Eventually I got interested in the MSU-1 and did some stuff with that instead (which I'm still working on, by the way. I just haven't had much progress to report lately).

This year, I'm not doing that stuff. I want to settle on one game design and work steadily towards it over the course of the entire year. I'm not saying I should be done with the game by the end of 2014, but I want to be able to look back and be proud of how much I've done.

I feel like it's a personal flaw that I can't release one game per month for the entire year, but... I just can't. I want to make games for a living, but I just need to focus on what I can do for now. I can focus on trying to live up to my personal expectations later when I have more experience.

My goal for January and February is to create a design document for my game for the year, and also to select an engine. This may take a while because I want to explore game engines that I don't have a lot of experience with, such as Unity. So there might be a lot of learning involved in these two months. Either way, at the end of each month I'm gonna post my progress here and possibly solicit feedback.

Goals for the Mega Man clone

I think I've mentioned this in replies to r/GameDev's Screenshot Saturday posts, but since this blog is my record of the development process, I may as well put down my intentions here. I mentioned in the first post of this blog that I wanted to write a game that I would enjoy playing and that's why I'm focusing on the NES Mega Man games. I really enjoy these games and I think that they're simple to program compared to other types of games I like playing (grand and sweeping RPGs, Civilization, Dynasty Warriors, etc).

That said, I don't want to just copy the Mega Man games straight up, but I feel that I don't have the experience to create my own original game right off the bat. Like how some artists start their careers with fan art of their favorite franchises or how some writers get their start in fan fiction, I need to start by imitating things I enjoy until I can feel confident in my abilities to make video games. Lots of forums and websites tell new comers to the craft to start really small. They recommend games like Pong or maybe Space Invaders or maybe 1942; but usually Pong. Making a game as simple as Pong can be great to practice your ability to make a game compelling, but I can't let myself go that small for reasons of maintaining my interest in the project as well as feeling like I could learn more by being more ambitious.

With that introduction out of the way, here's the major milestones I want to hit with this engine:

1. Replicate Cutman's level from Mega Man 1, release it (for free of course) online and gather feedback.
   Cutman's level is pretty simple all things considered. There's a good number of things for me to have to account for (boss fight, multiple enemies, some vertical as well as horizontal sections, etc) but not enough to overwhelm me (one level means no real weapon switching/upgrades, no level select or title screen really needed, a ton of enemies won't appear, no need to come up with and polish my own original level design, etc). All the functions of the game are pretty straight forward and easily checked. I could make improvements at this stage, but I probably won't make many (one improvement I will make is not implementing the infamous "Pause Trick" that lets you murder bosses easily). Once I have released this and gotten some feedback on what I did wrong or poorly, I can move on to the next stage.
2. Create a short game in the Mega Man tradition that doesn't copy weapon, enemy or level designs.
   This allows me to polish up things from the previous milestone and then improve on them and implement more functionality. I view this as a halfway point between starting from scratch and releasing my first "real" game. If I can get here, I'll have 4-5 levels with some sort of game mechanic that is hopefully fun and probably not very original. This step will be very much focusing on presentation and what it takes to release an actual game. Reaching this milestone will be a big deal for me because it will mean that I have what it takes to make a "real" game. I will have proved to myself that I have a shot at being successful at this. I'll release it for free online and more or less beg people to play it and give me feedback.
3. Create an honest to goodness video game and release it commercially.
   This milestone is currently a long way off, but it's part of what will keep me going. This is my carrot at the end of the stick. It doesn't matter if it's a success or not, it just matters that I make it here. It'd be great if it was a success for me (I'm defining success here as I can afford to take my wife out to dinner with the profits), but that's not the primary reason I'd be happy. If I can release a game commercially, then I've proven to myself that I have the basic skills to live as a game developer. This is the point where I would feel confident enough to apply to developer jobs at game studios. That far off dream is what gives me the energy to come home after work each day and program for another three to five hours.

I plan on documenting the entire process of reaching for these goals here, on this blog. As I go along I expect that I'll be writing posts about me learning things pertaining to design of a game overall, level design, making sprites (I'm a very poor artist) and debugging. As I release each milestone, I'll be posting about feedback I get and how I intend to incorporate those suggestions/criticisms into the engine. I'll also be taking breaks from programming sometimes to post here about past games I've made (successfully finished ones and maybe a post about the ones that were not so successful), if only to document my past failings and maybe learn something from them. I'll probably start that sometime in the next few weeks depending on how busy I get.