The path to game development is paved with terrible decisions

So here we are, October is over and so is #devtober.

I am not sure about what can go into the postmortem of an unfinished game, especially if it is a game on which I plan to keep working, but this postmortem is part of the challenge, so let’s do this as well.

I already had the theme clear in my mind and it was only a matter of translating it into code: cutting a few features in excess, improving the remaining ones…well, the usual.

As I had said in the beginning, I basically translated my original idea (3D first person game) into a 2D one, and even if it is usually viewed as the queen of terrible decisions, the transition was quicker than expected. 

It actually went very good until the last few days, but even then the sleepless and caffeine-filled catastrophe I had been fearing did not happen. I found an annoying bug in the enemy-world interaction, caused by another one of my terrible decisions: keeping the world a 2D-isometric one. I have been thinking it over and over, and considered switching it to a top-down one, but in the end laziness won and I did not change it, since I already had many iso tiles to build the world, while I did not have so many top-down ones.*

This is probably caused by another pillar in the book of terrible decisions: I had set te bar too high once again, and therefore my resolution to spend the #devtober month building a strong core for the game rather than finishing it allowed me to take it (too?) easy.

But hey, the challenge host himself said that it could also be about building a habit, and this is what I went for: I came from a 6 month long hiatus in my game development routine, and I needed a motivation to start again.

Well, I must say that this game revamping I have been doing in the past 31 days were very useful in that regard: my small game feels like a good idea again, and I want to keep working on it this winter.

So that’s it: did I manage to come up with a fully fleshed game which will be the next big thing on itch.io and steam? Clearly not. But then nothing guarantees that if i had done that I wouldn’t have stopped again, that the achievement of the big result wouldn’t have made me take another huge break.

This is not what I wanted: I wanted to fall in love with gamedev again, one line of code at a time, and finding a way to fit it with my day job and my daily routine crammed with so many different things, not to push and live an insane life for a months and then completely forget about it

In this regard, I feel like I can say it out loud: I did it!

The trip to the House of Rainbow goes on…

*as a side note, terrible decisions aren’t over yet: this is quite likely to be changed again, so stay tuned.