Don't Take the Cakes! Game Development Process #1

I've decided to try I'm something new. I'm attempting to share more of my game development process, so that you can have a look at how an always-busy, independent game developer with lots of things going on in life is working to develop games. I think lots of people are in this situation, whether you're a student balancing your school work and extracurricular activities, an adult juggling work, family and personal responsibilities, or whatever the case may be.  One of my biggest issues is that I never seem to have as much time to work on games as I'd like, so I hope I can give some tips on how to fit more game development into your schedule.

Also, I want to help you see some of the messy details that go into the game development process.  I have a lot of students who are learning about game development, and I thought that building this game out and sharing the development details might prove helpful to them.

The game I am showing you today is something I created in a few days for a game jam earlier this year.  If you don't know what a game jam is, you can learn more here.

The game jam theme was "You only get one".  For my game, your character is a bow-and-arrow wielding bunny, protecting a picnic lunch from an invasion of bugs. You have little bunny towers that act as barriers to help you, and you can shoot arrows to pop the bugs.  For each level, you must hold off the bugs from reaching your one stack of pancakes for a given amount of time.  If you make the time limit you win that level, but if they take your pancakes, it's over.  You also get one bug bomb per level to instantly wipe out all bugs on the screen.

I made the game in a beginner-friendly game engine called GDevelop. I'm a software engineer by profession, so I am good at coding, but one of the nice things about GDevelop is that you can quickly make games without writing a lot of code, and you have a nice level editor where you can easily create your game objects and visually lay them out on the screen. So if you're looking for suggestions on a beginner-friendly game engine, you might want to check out GDevelop.

Here's a little bit about the game play.  It's designed for a keyboard and mouse.  You can see it in the video linked above, or you can play it for yourself here on the game page.  For the jam, I had very limited time (because I had other deadlines in addition to my game during the jam week), so I wasn't able to add any good touch screen or mobile support.

What I'm working on now is improving and expanding the game and making it mobile-friendly. In addition to the version I'm showing you here on Itch, I also have my work-in-progress version it on the GDevelop site, where I will get more feedback on it when I'm ready.  The version on Itch is what I submitted to the jam, so it's not yet the same as what's on GDevelop.

For this first post today, there are some take-away points that I want to make, which you should keep in mind for your own games:

1. Right now, this game is not mobile friendly in the version that you see, as I mentioned.  For starters, you need a keyboard. If you want to make a game that plays well on mobile as well, you have to think of how the controls would work on a touch screen with limited input options.  With a keyboard or game controller, you have way more keys and buttons that you can use to control your game, whereas a touch screen or mobile device is a lot more restricted.  You might want to do onscreen buttons or controls, or just cut down on the number of controls you need.

2. This game is also not very polished, which I'm sure you can tell without me even mentioning it. The user interface (like the buttons, message backgrounds, things like that) don't look so great. The artwork is cute and well-done (thanks to Game Art Guppy), so that's not the problem, but you can see that like my message background doesn't really fit, my text spacing is not so good, and so on. This was done in a few days for a game jam, but for a real release, I will be working on getting the look, feel, and overall polish together.

So those are some things I will be working on and showing in future iterations. As you can see, I have a lot of work to do. As a busy person with work and tons of other things to do, I have to modify my expectations and realize that I will need to tackle this in small pieces with the time I do have. Even if that means I have to take a small step each day (which drives me nuts, because I always feel like I should be getting more done). What always helps me is making a task list, and then setting a timer for like 10 or 15 minutes, and then focusing on the tasks in that time window. I really see a difference between when I don't follow this method, and when I really buckle down and follow that plan.  I wrote about this also when I made my first game in 2014, when I was also juggling work and other responsibilities, but was probably less burned out.  Here is a link to an article about using this technique for learning, but you can apply it here as well.

So I think that's it for now.  I hope that this first video and post was helpful. Check back, I will continue on this little project.