For information about the game, head down to "What's the game about?" or
click here for the latest developments. Between here and there lay only blogging.
Four years ago, I said I was going to learn some programming chops and make a roguelike.
Three years ago, I said I was going to make a table-top game.
Two years ago, I didn't say crap because I was tired of hearing it from myself.
Last year, I said I was finally going to learn programming just to have something to do. For once, it actually stuck. With the help of this great forum, I finally knuckled under and hit the books, and with some trial and error and a fair bit of hand-holding I managed to make a couple very basic interactive programs and surpass the level of knowledge I had left behind in high school.
Then a funny thing happened: a few months into my awesome new hobby, it landed me a full-time job as a software developer. It's a career I know I can live with, and while I do feel more than a bit guilty about going to college for five years only to get promising work doing something completely unrelated after a couple months of self-study, I don't regret any of it. I can't afford to regret stuff like that anymore.
The problem though is that coding for pay completely killed by willingness to code for fun, both because I get so burned out from debugging my own shit eight-to-ten hours a day, and also because it's eaten up so much of that free time I used to have being nearly unemployed. But it's been six months since I've touched a project of my own and I don't have a damn clue where all that time went. Probably towards playing other people's real videogames.
So, I'm jotting some stuff down and making a proper "I'm working on this thing" thread. I've recognized that my two biggest problems are: letting ideas grow out of control until I spend more time thinking about them than I do actually working on them, and that I have almost zero motivation to do anything unless I feel like I 'have to'. I'm hoping a sense of public accountability and some organization skills I've learned at work will help me keep things on track for once, where they never really have before.
My third biggest problem is that I have too goddamn many ideas, and constantly bounce between them until I lose interest, having never produced anything of substance in the process. Step One of my new development pledge is to permanently disregard some old ideas I know are going nowhere.
Text adventure engine -
fuck that.
DIY wargame engine -
fuck that.
Zeppelin commander sim -
fuck that.
Fantasy dungeon designer -
fuck that.
Bionic Commando ripoff -
fuck that.
Tactical JRPG with a tweest -
fuck that.
Car company tycoon -
fuck that.
Apocalyptic bandit manager -
fuck that.
Super Mario 2 themed roguelike -
fuck that. Sadly.
I've abandoned other things in the process, like the novel I thought I would write, the book I wanted to write, blogs and such I wouldn't have updated anyway, and giving more than the slightest iota of shit about politics. I can't believe I ever
thought that could make fertile ground for a game. After all that, I have sworn to stick to exactly one task at least until I have something to show for it. (With minor distractions on the side, because that's just the way I am, but for real no more than one major project.)
"What's the game about?" I hear you ask. Not long before I lost the ability to work for myself, some comments on my code from Max White gave me a concept that I fallen more in the love with the more elaborate I make it. I've described it to a few people now and have been encouraged by its prospects. Since taking an established Good Idea and bolting lots of features onto it is an A+ way of making new games.
If you've read this far, please read the whole description to understand what I'm doing. In a nutshell, I'm jumping on the bandwagon of Minecraft/Terraria knockoffs. Seriously, hear me out, and if you're on this forum you can probably already guess where I'm going with this. Like most of the Internet, I recognize that Minecraft/Terraria are fantastic prototypes with three important 'flaws': sparse execution, a lack of goals, and to leave any significant dent in the world you have to invest substantial 'grind time'. It's no coincidence that so many Minecraft mods promise things like 'more variety' and 'automated smelting' and that the Holy Grail still remains some sort AI-mining routine. (And Terraria of course is anti-mod, and facing some stiff competition.)
Instead of investing in trying to bend somebody else's engine into the game I want to play, I'd rather start from the ground up with something original in itself to shovel in a wish-list of features. Yes, original, I don't think one can lay sole claim to the concept of 'randomized voxel sandbox' any more than one can patent the first-person shooter. And to those who enjoy the experience of mining down a mountain to move it elsewhere or just free-build I say bully and kudos, you have the game you want. In these and every other title, I find the 'dangeous exploration and prospecting' sides of gameplay the most entertaining, and find spending twenty minutes slowly moving with the mouse-button glued down not so entertaining, however ultimately rewarding. The investment in time and capital is fine, just give the player something else to do in the process.
However, I cannot start making that game today, because I don't know the first thing about making a program that operates in real-time independent of user input, nor do I have any idea how to make pictures appear on the screen. On the other hand, I am apeshit banaynay at back-end information processing with an interface no more complicated than a console window. My ultimate goal is a game where the player assumes the exciting task of exploring the gameworld, securing resources, laying down blueprints, and placing the granular elements, while the managed AI will fill in all the drudgery of actual harvesting, processing, organizing, transporting, and broad-stroke building. I know that combining the two will be by far the hardest task, and I can't even start on the first part yet. But the second part? With enough abstraction I can rock its socks off as a proof of concept to keep myself moving.
My goal here is to make an AI system that will handle high-effort low-fun tasks under the player's direction within the bare fundamentals of a randomly generated gameworld and player activity. This will serve as the prototype for the sideline interface of a more action-oriented game, should it ever exist. Along the way, I hope to teach myself some time-management and good development practices, especially with prototype-driven design. And if I catch anybody's interest or advice along the way, so much the better.