Twelve games in one semester. If I were to sum up how I felt after this experience in one word that would be “tired.” The experience was exhausting beyond all expectations and showed me just how truly terrible I am at scheduling my time. With a weekly due date always hanging above my head every second I wasn’t working felt like wasted time that I could be putting to better use. Of course I knew that no one could work every hour of every day, but games are an interesting medium. Even a game that takes only minutes to make can be worked on and improved for entire lifetimes. There is essentially no end to the changes and improvements that can be made to a game so, in essence, a game is never truly done, and when a tight schedule is involved the list of features must be carefully planned taking into account how long each art asset will take, how many programming errors you’re likely to make, and what else you have planned for that week. My racing game had substantially less than many of my other games because I had a large paper due that week, while my TBS game is much larger because I was able to assign far more time to it, but this was just another challenge of my project. Each week had its own challenges so I should take a minute to discuss the games I’ve made since my last reflection.
Week eight’s genre was stealth. This was not a particularly difficult genre, though I had plans for a rather elaborate game involving ninjas and holy knights based on an old game jam I’d done, but there was an unfortunate complication that forced me to cut my game’s size considerably. Due to a rather serious illness I lacked the strength needed to design my game and was thus forced to cut it down to an incredibly simple version of my original concept though the game I did end up creating was far from a failure, and if I had had more time to balance the game I feel it could have been quite an entertaining game. Luckily, though, this week gave me the time I needed to regain enough my strength that I was able to really push myself with week nine.
Week nine’s genre was TBS. The game’s concept was something that I had been playing with in my own mind and on scraps on paper for quite some time, and as week nine also happened to coincide with a game jam, I felt it was the perfect opportunity to see if I could make my idea a reality. Unfortunately, by the end of the game jam I was left with a failure. I hadn’t properly focused my work and was thus left with many pieces of a full game. If I had better focused my attention on just perfecting the combat, I would’ve produced a far superior game. The rest of the week was spent attempting to improve on all of the features that I had tried to implement during the game jam, and while the project improved substantially, the combat system remained flawed as it lacked the flow I was attempting to attain. However, I did still see potential in this project and intended to continue working on it.
Week ten’s genre was Racing, and as I stated earlier, the scope had to be scaled down due to another project though it could be argued that the previous week’s game burned me out as the roguelike game did earlier this semester. I struggled to create a concept that I could easily implement in the time I had available, and while the project was simple and lacked balance, I was content with what I managed to accomplish in the short amount of time I had available.
Week eleven’s genre was Avant Garde, and like the previous week I had another project that I knew would eat up a great deal of my time, but instead of allowing these two projects to conflict with one another, I decided to make them one and the same. My other project involved creating custom textures from arrays and then modifying the array to alter the texture. I called this Pixel Wizard, and though this name has been thoroughly mocked, I am still quite happy with it. The majority of my week was spent building and testing Pixel Wizard. I started off with small examples using old sprites as testing material. For the first few tests I created an array in which each element represented whether or not a pixel existed at a certain location and from there, I altered the code so that each element of the array represented the color of a pixel at a certain location. The code then ran through a loop that altered the array in a small way and then updated the texture. This repeated many times a second creating a smooth animation.
For the game itself, I decided to create an entire game consisting of a single texture that was the size of the screen. The idea was interesting, but unfortunately, the resulting array was incredibly large and constantly updating it resulted in the game only running at about 2 to 6 frames per second. Looking back I probably could’ve scaled down the screen size to have the game run faster, but that would’ve limited the aesthetic beauty provided by Pixel Wizard. In the end I could hardly call the game a success, but the week provided me the chance to build a new tool that could revolutionize how I make games. This tool proved very useful in my work from week twelve onward.
Week twelve was the final project, so calling it a week is a bit off as it lasted for several weeks. I started with an empty project and began rebuilding my TBS game from the beginning so I could clean up the code and fix the problems I was having with the combat. I managed to drastically improve the game’s flow by making the combat system less complicated and by relying on angled swipes instead of a series of directional ones. I also used Pixel Wizard to improve the game. The health bars and progress bars were a product of Pixel Wizard, allowing for useful transitions and color changes. I also used it to create an effect when the enemy was destroyed.
In many ways this game best showed off my own style. The freedom of unbound attacking controlled only by the player’s own physical limits mimics my own lifestyle and desire to move faster than limits machines place on me. The reimagining of a classic genre in a new style is also reminiscent of my altered view of the world.
And so my semester of creating a game-a-week comes to an end. As I have said many times before, the experience has been completely exhausting. The stress of a constant due date was both nerve-wracking and motivating as it pushed me to always be focused on the next deadline, and while this experience caused a great deal of stress, it also allowed me to greatly improve my skills. I find myself producing games far more quickly and having a better perception of whether or not a game will succeed earlier in the development process. This is of course not to say my guess I’m always right about how a game will feel, but this project has improved my understanding of what makes for a good play experience, and I believe that this will be incredibly beneficial moving forward as I continue to create games.
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