Epiphanies and possible recovery on the horizon

So recently I've been diagnosed with ADHD. Which explains a lot. Those highs and lows, and the impossibility of maintaining one hobby, the compulsion to jump around interests as they rise and fall in how interesting they seem to be? Well, many people get that, but ADHDers tend get that to such disturbing heights that they start doubting whether they can finish anything at all. Which is pretty much a description of yours truly.

The medication helps a lot. When I take it, I can finally think normally about certain things. These frantic thought spirals, amounting to "I have to do it or I'll die", and "I can't do it, or I'll die", are dimmed down. Things just start looking interesting or boring. And most of the stuff I've found interesting throughout my life - well, it still looks interesting, but not to the exclusion of everything else. It's such a relief you wouldn't believe.

Thus, I might be well on my path to being able to make a game again. I just need a little bit more time to settle down with my newly acquired insights.

More burnout and stuff

Alright, it's been a while. This entire burnout thingy seems to be more severe than I thought at first. I've been cautiously thinking about my new shards game, but I can't bring myself to actually start coding. On the bright side, at least I've had time to play some of the games I've been postponing. So now I know with certainty - I don't like Undertale. The combat is tedious and boring, and I don't really find the storyline or the characters as charming or endearing as advertised. On the other hand, I love Hyper Light Drifter. Everything about it is fantastic: the art, the music, the story, the gameplay... I guess I need to enjoy the games a bit too, instead of working on them all the time. Well, it is what it is. The next time I write will hopefully be when I restore my passion for game dev, this time in a calm, sustainable way.

Burnout and stuff

After a couple of years of intense work on game dev while simultaneously handling the wrath of the little gremlin, I think I burned out a little. It's very difficult to even think of coding outside of my day job. Fortunately, I'm not burned out on games as a whole, as my newly rediscovered love of shoot'em ups is flourishing. However, I need to rethink my approach to my hobbies a little.

I'm a very intense person when it comes to my interests. When I'm interested in something, I go in wholesale. So when I started making games on a semi-regular basis, I delved in deeply, I thought about game dev all day every day and I spent every bit of free time coding, watching tutorials, making graphics or sounds or doing any number of other related activities. In hindsight, it's amazing that the 'high' lasted as long as it did, but it might be actually because being a parent makes your free time a bit sparse, so while you can think about game dev all the time, you can't DO game dev all the time.

The key seems to be taking regular breaks, not only from actually doing, but also thinking about related things. So from now on I'll attempt to take it easy on my hobbies. I'll take one-two runs per day in Danmaku Unlimited 3, and otherwise I'll make every effort not to binge on shmup-related youtube videos. And also, during the weekend I might sit down and make a Bitsy vignette, but nothing too taxing. I need some time off, so that when I'm not in a coding frenzy I won't beat myself up about the fact that I'm not in a coding frenzy.

Alright, that's it for today. I'll post my progress regularly as a form of documentation, so that I can review it later in the future.

Rethinking the challenge - a game a month?

Alright, this week shows that making a game every week is not sustainable for me. During the weekend we’ve been doing some family things, and my free time for dev work has shrunk down to almost zero. I’ve been also a bit stressed about having to churn out “something” every week, to the point that I really don’t want to do this anymore. It was a valuable experience but it’s time to move to something more realistic, like “a game a month”. It will still be tiny projects, but stretched to a longer period, so that I don’t have to work fast and stress out about things. I also don’t want to spend the entirety of my available time developing or thinking about developing, I want time to actually play some games and do other stuff, like finally watch episode two of the second season of Picard with my wife. And finish the book I’ve been reading sluggishly for the past two months.

A completely unrelated side note: I’m typing this blog post on my iPad placed slightly tilted on my desk, a bit like a keyboard, and somehow it works well, I’m bizarrely not making more mistakes than typing on an actual keyboard. Who would have thought?

Intermission - random musings on life and Sega Mega Drive

No game this week. I've been very tired, and even though I started working on the tactics game I've mentioned in the previous post, I had to take a break this week and rest. Taking care of a nearly-three-year-old is exhausting, and in the few evening hours I scraped off for myself I decided to unwind and play some Mega Drive shoot'em ups to let my brain take a break.

The thing I've learned this time is that generally I've cheated a little during the challenge. I've made very simple things using very simple tools, and I've had one weekend with a ton of free time. However, with the time I normally have it's nearly impossible to make anything substantial in a week. I have to think whether to tweak the rules of the challenge a little, or maybe stop it altogether and go do something else, like I'd threatened to do.

Also, it's been the first time I've ever played Zero Wing. It's a really good game! The graphics and cutscenes are very well made, it's only the translation that makes it unintentionally hilarious. But it's such a quintessential 90s experience for me that I think it's just glorious. I intend to play it more today, after the aforementioned gremlin finally falls asleep.

Week 7 - Somewhat interactive thingy - Choo Choo Toy

It's here: https://matzieq.itch.io/choo-choo-toy

Yeah, so it's a train going forwards. Stop it with Z, and start it again with X. Nothing else to it. Yes, really. So why did I make it? Umm... my three year old son loves trains, and he also loves Pico-8 games. It was a happy accident, really, one day when I was working on Weird Shape Matching he ran into the room (he only uses two methods of locomotion: running like a madman and jumping around like a madman) and saw pretty pictures on the screen, so naturally he wanted to watch. So I showed him a couple of games, and now him watching me play Pico-8 games is pretty much a staple in our home.

And therefore, because despite all my gloomy bitsy ruminations I love him very much, I wanted to make something specially for him. So I made this choo choo train, popping down the track, and making silly noises. Predictably, he was hooked, and we sat down and co-designed several objects. By which I mean him shouting "Daddy, another house!", followed by daddy drawing yet another house in the sprite editor.

The cars are all his favorites: the passenger car ("PASSENGERS GET ON!"), the coal car ("COAL COAL COAL!"), the oil car ("FUEL FUEL FUEL!") and the banana transport car, which is a thing in his universe. Also, the reason daddy goes to work every morning is so that we can buy bananas. Just so you know.

And there you have it. Not much to it, just plain old fun and experimentation. So what I learned is that sometimes it's worth just to fool around, and make something playful and fun without any particular reason or goal. Oh yeah, and I made a particle generator for the smoke, which is the first time I've ever dabbled in particles. And I still love Pico-8, it's just so fast and fun to develop for, and it has this wonderful property that whenever I sit down and launch it, finished games come out.

Next week I'm going to attempt to make a small tactical combat moment to get a feel for the combat system I intend to put into my next Pico-RPG. 

Week 6 - Another Bitsy game - The Weekend

Last week I set out to make a bullet hell prototype, but instead I made yet another Bitsy short story, which you can play here: https://matzieq.itch.io/the-weekend

I've learned a couple of lessons. The first one was again, a matter of scope. I thought if I wanted to "make a moment from an X game" it would be doable in a week, as opposed to "make an X game", which would not be doable in a week. Well, making a moment is certainly doable in less time than making an entire game, but this time I've picked a very specific genre, which, as it turns out, is an incredibly complex one, and making even a simple moment (like a single boss fight) from such a game would be maybe doable in a month, but in a week, and with my schedule - it was simply not feasible. 

So I wanted to settle down on just a vertical shmup. But the issue here was this: look at my offer at https://matzieq.itch.io/. Among the comments that you could make having viewed that, there would likely be one like this: "boy, that guy really likes him some Space Invaders". And you would be correct, Space Invaders happens to be one of my favorite games of all time, and I've made a lot of clones of Space Invaders. In fact, when a long time ago, in caveman time, I first sat down and learned some GameMaker, a Space Invaders clone was the first thing that I thought I'd make on my own. Therefore I scrapped the idea of making a vertical shmup. I didn't think there would be much more I could make in a week than another space invadersy game, and there wouldn't be much to learn from that.

Instead, I decided to give in to my deep desires. After I made a Bitsy game last week, I just couldn't get Bitsy out of my mind. It was like with Pico-8 - I passed it everyday in the street while going to work, and didn't pay much attention to it, but when I finally stopped and had a conversation with it, I immediately fell in love and wanted to spend my every waking moment with it. That was possibly the worst analogy I've ever made.

This entire situation also got me thinking about what I wanted to get from this challenge, and I'm starting to lean into the reasoning that perhaps maybe it could be not false to assume that I've already got it. I figured out what games I want to make. Right now I am considering delving into a 1-2 month project, a spiritual successor to my favorite game made by myself, Shards of Destiny. How do I know I'll be able to do it in 1-2 months, and not 4-5 years? Because that's what took me to get Shards to a state I'm reasonably happy with, and I'll be using Pico-8, which won't let me go over a certain treshold of stuff to cram in. So I feel reasonably confident I can do it. I am also planning this thing out in considerable detail on paper, so that I'm not doing any yolo development which ALWAYS leads straight to half-done purgatory. In the meantime, I'll probably also keep making small Bitsy vignettes, because I love making them.

This plan keeps me out of tutorial hell, and whenever I sit at a computer to "work on games", I'll know exactly what to do. Which is where I hoped the "a game a week" challenge would lead me.