Failing to finish a game
7 months is a lot of time. Surely in 7 months I with enough dedication I could make a decent game. Well I didn't do that. :/
I'm fairly new to game development in the grand scheme of things, but since mid-July 2022, I've been pretty consistently building games in Godot. At the time of writing that makes it 900~ days. What do I have to show for all this work? Not as much as I would have hoped to be honest. Mostly because of the amount of projects that have been scrapped.
Brass Bistro
Brass Bistro is a game I look back on with some regrets.
The premise is you play as this robot who runs a restaurant, traversing alien worlds to find better ingredients.
It was kind of hard to write a definition of what it was here because my scope and ideas of what it should be kept changing throughout development. Scope creep turned what was a small game about running a restaurant into almost an exploration game. Originally, the player would farm their own crops, then they would explore their environment to gather ingredients instead, THEN the environment was for finding permanent collectibles to upgrade the player's movement as well. I even had a hover move similar to R2D2 in the lego star wars games at one point.
For what was supposed to be about running a restaurant, I also recall spending a lot of time on building a system inspired by Crosscode that fakes 3D geometry and physics in a 2D isometric perspective. This was far beyond my skill level and took weeks and weeks to make work for something that added nothing to the core gameplay of running the restaurant. The movement then changed from simple hover platforming to just point and click walking. But hey, the fake 3D stuff looked cool.
This is the character designs progression. Surprisingly, it got lower fidelity as I tried to simplify the graphics over time rather than higher. Originally I even used a 3D rendered character that was projected into the 2D world.
Left : Oldest, Right : Newest
In the end, it strayed so far from the idea of a cooking game that when I went back to add the cooking mechanics, I realised my code was such a mess, it was nearly impossible to add any of the things I needed to without breaking a million other systems.
The one thing I am quite happy with about this game is some of my pixel art. The main character especially is pretty cute and I plan on just copying the character design for my current project.
Looking through all my old commits though, I reckon the artstyle didn't really improve that much, but became just kinda different in each iteration.
October 2023
Wow 3D rendered character I sure hope this doesn't disappear in the next 0-3 months!
Sometime between October and January
Damn it
January 2024
Shrunk
March 2024
aesthetic pastel pallette
At at certain point, the jank was too much and I opted to abandon the project which was structured so poorly that it was probably worth rewriting the whole thing from scratch.
What have I learnt?
So what do I mean when I say I haven't made as much as I would have liked? Well... A pretty large majority of the time I've spent working on games has been dedicated to projects that never saw the light of day. If I could go back, I would have focused on participating in more game jams and doing smaller projects that were more achievable. By making games that were too big like this and a few others (see demos), I made some things that are pretty technically impressive but were too big to finish.
Also, they aren't lying when they say to make small games. My first game was pretty well scoped. This, not so much. If I had more slowly ramped up the complexity, I reckon there would be a lot more finished games on my itch page. I'd say, if you're taking on a big project, always be sure that you are SUPER sure that you have the skills to accomplish it, otherwise you are setting yourself up for disappointment when future you has to either spend far too long or ditch it altogether. I'm not saying you shouldn't experiment with harder stuff though, just make sure you're ready for it.
Present day - What I'm doing different
My current project right now is my grocery store game. It's described much better on my current projects page but to summarise, its a grocery store simulation game where you run your store. I'm trying not to overscope this one too badly but this is by far my biggest project that I will (hopefully) release.
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Setting a clear scope. By setting a clear scope on how large the game should be, you can avoid setting up too much work. Initially, the store you would have managed was a department store, however this means an enormous amount of items would have needed to be included to seem reasonable which increases development time without adding much to the experience. So instead, I just made it groceries which still allows for a lot of variety in items but not too much.
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I'm also keeping track of my goals more efficiently by writing LOTS of to-do lists so I don't lose track of what needs to get done in order to make progress forward. If I don't track what needs to be done, I end up just fixing up really minor details over and over again so that barely anything changes like I did with the art style of Brass Bistro.
Conclusion and advice
But did those 7 months really do nothing? I learnt mistakes to avoid and improved my programming a ton. I also turned it into a blog so at least I made something out of it
Remember, my opinion is objectively true and if your opinion differs from mine you are wrong.
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