August 4, 2009

Postmortem: Balls

So it's been what? Two, three years since I discovered the art of programming and I haven't made one single game?! Well now I'm not counting the visual basic nightmare mastermind I made a long time ago but a real game. Whatever that means. I've had these monster-projects;

1. point and click monkey island style adventure game - the beginning c++ adventure for me. Kinda harsh start up don't you think? I thought so too - it never got anywhere near completion or playability.
   
2. another heavy game - think fully destructible environment. Need I say more?... No.
   
3. the Game Engine - the project everyone dreams of making games ends up doing and either discover it didn't amount in anything playable, which I did, or you'll end up thinking creating games is extremely hard and it'll take years for just a small game.
   
4. the Dream project - I've been thinking of making a few posts about the games in my dreams. Which I'll most certainly complete! Sometime... Maybe...?!
   

Somewhere about now I got interested in Indie games. I think World of Goo was the first but I'm not really sure. Maybe armadillo run or bridge builder? Damn! I couldn't even google the link to bridge builder aka pontifex 3 - all I found was a thousand torrent sites...

But what I did find was kloonigames, some guy who did the same thing I'm doing. Or I'm doing the same as him: following the footsteps of the Experimental Gameplay Project. Making a game in 7 days, something surely impossible, and I haven't even made any game before! Oh crap! But as Petri (kloonigames dude) so elegantly put it:

My experiences told my that creating, even a small, game takes months, if not years. So to do it in 7 days seem frightening. And not only the code, but graphics, music, sound, levels and all things included. I shit my pants even thinking about it and almost gave up. Luckily I realized that the worst thing that could happen (beside shitting my pants) was wasting a week of my life. I could do that easily with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon.

And here's a summary of my first ever game Balls. It's available here for download.

The Good

1. I got it done!
   It seemed impossible and it scared the hell out of me. But I made it!! Aaah... It feels so good right now. And the game is actually pretty fun! It doesn't suck, it doesn't crash (but it's a bit buggy) and I can sort of say I managed to stick to my theme Addictive Gaming. Now with this over with I can focus on my next game. Not just now but in a while, now I'm confident to try new, bigger and hopefully better things and I know I can pull it off!

   I'm on top of the world! Nothing is impossible! Superman and Neo - you're just sooo jealous right now.

2. It didn't even take long...
   I end up using timelog from kloonigames to track my time. The game took 25,5 hours to make, but I spent 7,5 hours of that time on a break! Either reading manga, playing cs or just surfing around and chatting. This isn't the time to nag about my lack of concentration and that I'm lazy, this is where I realize I didn't even work myself to death making the game. I could afford a break here and there, and now when I think about it they were really necessary.

3. Pressure is good
   I did manage to implement some physics and collision detection, even though it's really simple. This was a first for me and I did it under a tight schedule! A coincidence? I don't think so, a small amount of pressure is really really good. It is during these times I'm most productive and I really do get things done if I have to.
   

The Bad

1. The motivation didn't stick
   Although I made the game and it was pretty good I didn't even remotely invest as much time in it as I could - and I don't know why. I lost that super motivation pretty early in development and when I hit a bug or something that needed a lot of changing to implement I usually cut corners or just ran away screaming.

   Is this the every day life of a developer? If it's this though to get motivated wonder how you can motivate yourself working on a shitty project?
   

The Ugly

1. The code
   Wow - I'm never showing the source of this to anyone! I tried doing the things which would make the game nearest completion, I did cut some corners but in the end the job is done. But it's really ugly and before reusing the code I'll need to clean it up a lot!

   What's that smell...? It stinks of smelly code!