Kind of Antsy

Okay! So, I’ve been working on developing a game for a couple months and while it’s definitely not ready for primetime, it is starting to take shape and I figured that I should write down my thoughts on the process. So this is week 1 of me writing, not week one of development. I try to spend at least a little time every day working on this, but being that I have a full-time job and kids, it’s pretty difficult to commit a lot of time. I’m collaborating with my buddy Andrew who runs RenGen Marketing where I’ll handle the development and he’ll handle the marketing and we can bounce ideas off one another to make this small project something worthwhile.

The goal of this project was to be something that a single developer could accomplish in a reasonable amount of time, so a pretty small scope. The project is a top-down horror game that uses light surrounding you as your life. If the light depletes, you die. Light depletes as time passes, and when you’re hit your light ‘spills’ onto the ground and can be picked up again. When enemies are killed, they also drop light. As you play the game, you gain experience that carries over from life to life, and allows you to level up strength, defense, and the light’s rate of decay. Currently, the only objective is to defeat zombies, but there will be other objectives for the level and a story tying the levels together.

Here’s a screenshot of what we have so far (I’ll switch it up to videos in the future):

Note: The blue light is a pickup that expands the radius of your light circle as you are inside of it.

So, now for some thoughts on the process:
I really wish I was better at planning my code out. I feel like I’m decent at figuring stuff out and getting things working, but I’m still learning how to best structure out everything in terms of the architecture. At this stage in the game, things are changing pretty quickly, so it may end up being that the planning goes to waste. That said, I’m trying to adhere to good coding practices as much as I can, but I know that I’m making mistakes. Fortunately, I think this project is small enough that it can withstand some less than perfect coding and still be viable.

My plan right now is to just get everything working with no polish, then work on iteration and polish. The combat isn’t where I want it to be yet, for sure, but that’s something I think I can correct through iteration. There are also effects and better UI that need to be implemented at some point.

The next few steps:
1. Keep experience, level, and stats saved from run to run
2. Get all menus working properly (Death, Level Up, Pause, Main Menu)

Once these are done, this will be a hugely flawed and unpolished, but technically a playable game.