The #Gamedev Diaries - Week 1
I have two game-related goals for 2020 - to keep a game diary of all the games I play, and to ship and release my very own game. I want to keep a bit of a journal on the second one as well, to monitor progress. Why do it here? I don’t know, really. Keeps me honest I guess.
Background
Over the past 8 or so years I have dabbled with coding. I made a few simple and now defunct apps for iOS and Android, which was fun. I did half of the Harvard X CS50 course and each of the free options at Codecademy. I taught myself some Javascript to make the aforementioned apps using Titanium from Appcelerator, mostly by just playing with the coding. I also dabbled a bit in Gamemaker Studio, which is the engine I’ve ended up going with for this project.
Like many people, I’ve always had ideas for all sorts of games I’d like to make. The most recent is an idea that by design is meant to be relatively simple, so I should be able to get it to some semblance of complete within a year (famous last words - cue 4 years time, when the feature creep has bloated my designs to a grand procedural open world with RPG elements).
I won’t go too deep into the project yet, but at a very top level: the game is a small business sim, in which you must balance profit and worker happiness to succeed. Events occur at various stages that causes these meters to go up and down depending on how you react to them, kind of like a simple twine game with numbers. I have spent all of my working life in the wine industry, mostly on and around bottling lines, so that’s where the base knowledge of how the business works pulls from.
Estimated time spent so far: 15 hours
Apart from writing up 2 pages worth of a design doc in December and putting together a few basic sprites on Boxing Day, my work properly began on Jan 1st. I have spent my time watching quite a few tutorials from Shaun Spalding on YouTube which has been extremely helpful. These videos, starting with the Your First Game playlist, have helped reacquaint me with the very basics of Gamemaker. While Gamemaker is designed in a way that you can make games without coding, I’m much more comfortable using code than these in built functions, which works out well with theway Shaun’s tutorials work.
So far I’ve implemented a couple of very basic systems. There’s the main field, which just displays information, the play space (the dummy sprites re: the line and the people do nothing yet) and a button to progress time. When that is clicked, time moves forward, where sometimes an event pops up with options that affect the numbers in the top left.
That’s it so far! Hope I can keep these up, not sure if I’ll go weekly/fortnightly/monthly yet, but we’ll see.