Time for Sacrifice

Having taken two days off work in order to get some work done on my game and not getting nearly as much work done as I would have liked, I've realised that I don't have time to get all I wanted done before the August deadline. Therefore a sacrifice must be made in the form of the level editor, which is almost in a working state but not quite detailed enough to be included in the final release. So the plan now is to use it for making that base levels script the rest and strip it from the game.

Time Running Out

So time is running out for me to get my Dream Play Build entry done. The level editor has taken far too long to do and is still not finished. The levels need built which relies on the level editor, the sound needs polished and the graphics need completed but some lessons have been learned.

A Few Lessons Learned

First is keep the game small, don't go for a game which will take a long time to make. Since I do this as a hobby my motivation is dependent on how much fun I have and working on the same game for 6 months is not fun.

Go for procedural generation whenever possible, as it will reduce the need for content creation which can be very time consuming and add quite a lot to storage needs of the game.

Avoid adding things that aren't really part of the game i.e. level editors. In my case writing a level editor is very similar to what I do for my job and so it is not at all appealing to do this in my spare time.

A good design from the start is needed. By good I really mean complete, basically have everything that is going to be in the game set from the start. This means you know exactly what the next step is, which would have saved me so much time.