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.

A short summary after five weeks

It's been five weeks since I started this and I've made five games. That's more games than I made in the last two years. It feels amazing. Thanks to the deadlines and the necessary limitation of scope I feel more focused than ever, and I'm no longer jumping from tech to tech without rhyme or reason, watching tutorial after tutorial with nothing coming out of it. I also see that I can do it - I set rules for myself and I am consistently making game after game. First, I decide what I want to do, then I figure out what tech is best for what I want to do, and finally I just do it. It's awesome.

After those five weeks, seeing all the choices I've made and the types of games I've created, and also looking back at my other games that I'm really proud of and that I enjoyed making, suddenly the pattern, my personal process for making games is starting to become clear. 

First, I prefer minimalist, very lo-fi presentation, with very low resolutions, monochrome sprites, barely any animation and simplistic sounds. I enjoy making this type of assets and I like how they look and feel in a finished game. 

Second, I'm not so keen on twitchy games. I like platformers, but of the slower and more deliberate nature, such as Jumpstick Robo, my one-button jam contribution, and also the unfinished Caverns of Ksantarus, which got stuck in a limbo because I overscoped and left too much stuff unplanned - but I still like the core idea. My preferred type of game to make is a tile-based grid-movement adventure/RPG that is very light on rules, and also more like a short story than an epic novel. My favorite game that I made so far is "Shards of Destiny", which is just as I described, and the second favorite has to be "A walk through the river valley", my latest creation in Bitsy. Both are games where you walk around a small world, with very sparse and minimalistic presentation, you talk/interact with the environment and figure out the tiny, charming (in the Shards case) or pessimistic (in the river walk case) story, piece by piece. 

Third, I like small, but self-contained tools. Tools that allow you to make assets, write code and test your game all in one application. So things like Pico-8 and microStudio, but definitely NOT Unity. I also prefer simple, dynamic languages over giant OOP monsters like C#, or the yolo crazyland of C. I'm especially fond of Lua. And I'm no longer inclined to listen to people who say that scripting languages are crap and that you need static typing or the universe implodes. I no longer feel that I need to prove anything to anyone. If I figure out that the best way to make a game is vanilla Javascript on top of Pixi through Electron, so be it.

And the last thing is that I like to work alone. I've heard about the merits of collaboration, but it doesn't work for me. I have no problems with teamwork at my company (I'm a frontend developer by day), but my games are deeply personal and I don't really want to work on someone else's ideas.

One surprise that I had during the challenge was that I very much enjoyed specialist genre-specific game making tools, more than I'd suspect. I'm talking here mainly about Puzzlescript and Bitsy. While Crate Cat taught me that puzzle games are not my forte, I've also enjoyed Puzzlescript so much, that I'm wondering now how to hack it to make something other than a puzzle using it. And Bitsy is a marvel, it's one of those things that I'm mad at myself for not trying before, as I've known about its existence for years. Someday I must take RPGMaker for a serious spin.

Thus, if I am to make something bigger, it'll probably be a lo-fi grid-based simple RPG that builds on Shards of Destiny, and I'll make an editor for the game to make it easy to put together maps, quests and storylines.

And that's it for now. I'll keep making one week contraptions for at least fiver more weeks, to build a habit and confidence in my abilities. I'll see what I can learn from other genres and tools. And then I'll start something slightly larger, maybe I'll switch to a game a month for a change. Make some things this way. Then, I think, I'll be ready for a half-year project. Then maybe a year-long one. For now, I don't want to go over a year, I don't think I could handle working on a single project for that long without going crazy. But we'll see.

Week 5 - Bitsy game - A walk through the river valley

It's the end of week 5, and I indeed made a bitsy game, A walk through the river valley.

Bitsy is a fantastic tool to make small, minimalistic, lo-fi experiences where you walk around and talk to people. It can be used to make old-school adventure games, where you collect items and try to find uses for them, or games where you just interact with the environment to piece together a story, as in my game.

It's very simple to use, it provides enough constraints to force you to focus on the story you are telling instead of visuals, but also it's open enough that you don't really feel limited in the type of story you can tell. There's absolutely zero programming (unless you count inserting some tags into text as programming), and even a non-artist such as yours truly can make some 8x8 1-bit sprites that look at least passable. Normally I find no-code game making tools very cumbersome and I'd rather write code than drag blocks around and fiddle with menus, but Bitsy has none of that. It's so simple and focused that you don't really need any code or blocks to drag. You just draw objects, place them and write text for interactions.

What also surprised me was that the online editor is responsive, and it actually is a viable option to make a game using nothing but a phone. It's a first for me. Construct 3 advertises itself as mobile-friendly, but its mobile interface is horrible, and it's absolutely proprietary anyway. MicroStudio could theoretically work, but it's a nightmare on a small screen, unless it's a tablet, but even then you need a keyboard or you'll go crazy in five minutes. Godot web editor specifically states that it doesn't work on mobile. Bitsy, on the other hand, is pretty, sleek, and works very well on my tiny 4.7 inch Safari. And since you don't need to write any code, the only time you need to type is when writing dialogue, and so it's bearable.

I've also learned that I really like making this type of games - short, narrative-driven adventures where you just explore and interact with the environment. I especially enjoyed writing all the dialogue (or monologue in this case), the game touches on the pretty heavy subject of having ambivalent and outright dark feelings about parenthood, but it was incredibly cathartic to just get this out of my system. It was also extremely fast to put this together. I've had very limited time this week, and I still managed to upload it on Saturday, while usually it takes me until Sunday evening to get something going. Neat!

This is definitely not my last Bitsy game. The editor is has its quirks, but it's a joy to use, and I really enjoy the games that it can make.