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Game Dev - 2023 Review
a year ago
Been a few months since I did one of these, but instead of doing a month by month break down, I thought I’d combine it with a review of the year.
-Procrastination and Laziness-
Despite having a lot of time on my hands, I struggle with actually getting off my arse (or should that be on my arse) and making things. Even people with less time on their hands seem better about getting things done than me.
I’ve been trying a few self-help techniques from around the internet to see if they help. From trying to do a little each day, to having fun for its own sake without excuse or justification. While it’s too early to say which help and which don’t, I’m continuing to try different things to see what works long term. Speaking of which…
-The One Hour Asset Challenge-
One of the biggest revelations of the last few months has been the one hour asset challenge. As the name implies, this is a self imposed challenge where a single game asset can’t take more than one hour. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking this has been very good at getting rid of perfectionism and streamlining my techniques.
A great example is a white metal texture from ScreamingBrain’s CC0 texture pack. I use it as a sort of swiss army texture. It’s stood in for plastic, dry wall, and of course metal with some simple vertex colour changes.
While “one hour code” doesn’t work, the same mindset does apply. An example was I had problems getting projectiles to fly straight. After spending far too long trying to get it to work “the right way”, I just stuck a character node on it with no hitbox and used that. Worked perfectly.
-Back to Basics-
Another big revelation this year was my interest in low power consoles. Be in modern tools for retro consoles like GBStudio, modern mod tools for old games like Doom Builder, fantasy 8-bit consoles like Pico-8 and TIC-80, or even videos about old games like Behind the Code.
While I never used the Pico-8, the tutorials for it were something I learned from when it comes to how a game is constructed outside the default workflow of specific engines. Eg. Godots scene system can get fiddley when it comes to simple practical problems like pausing a game. In Pico-8, it’s common practice to have a game state variable. Pausing the game is as simple as changing the game state.
That seems a bit brief for a year but I both did a lot and not much. There was a racing game that didn’t pan out. The Game Boy game and the Doom map were both a success. The small FPS game is going slowly, but at least it’s going.
I do have plans for next year, but I’ll talk about that in another post.
-Procrastination and Laziness-
Despite having a lot of time on my hands, I struggle with actually getting off my arse (or should that be on my arse) and making things. Even people with less time on their hands seem better about getting things done than me.
I’ve been trying a few self-help techniques from around the internet to see if they help. From trying to do a little each day, to having fun for its own sake without excuse or justification. While it’s too early to say which help and which don’t, I’m continuing to try different things to see what works long term. Speaking of which…
-The One Hour Asset Challenge-
One of the biggest revelations of the last few months has been the one hour asset challenge. As the name implies, this is a self imposed challenge where a single game asset can’t take more than one hour. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking this has been very good at getting rid of perfectionism and streamlining my techniques.
A great example is a white metal texture from ScreamingBrain’s CC0 texture pack. I use it as a sort of swiss army texture. It’s stood in for plastic, dry wall, and of course metal with some simple vertex colour changes.
While “one hour code” doesn’t work, the same mindset does apply. An example was I had problems getting projectiles to fly straight. After spending far too long trying to get it to work “the right way”, I just stuck a character node on it with no hitbox and used that. Worked perfectly.
-Back to Basics-
Another big revelation this year was my interest in low power consoles. Be in modern tools for retro consoles like GBStudio, modern mod tools for old games like Doom Builder, fantasy 8-bit consoles like Pico-8 and TIC-80, or even videos about old games like Behind the Code.
While I never used the Pico-8, the tutorials for it were something I learned from when it comes to how a game is constructed outside the default workflow of specific engines. Eg. Godots scene system can get fiddley when it comes to simple practical problems like pausing a game. In Pico-8, it’s common practice to have a game state variable. Pausing the game is as simple as changing the game state.
That seems a bit brief for a year but I both did a lot and not much. There was a racing game that didn’t pan out. The Game Boy game and the Doom map were both a success. The small FPS game is going slowly, but at least it’s going.
I do have plans for next year, but I’ll talk about that in another post.
