4/18/2021 0 Comments [CANCELLED] - Part 1 DISCLAIMER: This blog post was written back in 2019. Portions of this blog post have been rewritten to either omit certain information or update content to be more accurate to the current year. Despite these changes, most of the writing was kept intact for posterity.
Today I decided I'd sit down and talk about dead projects. I think most game developers know how this goes. You come up with a fun idea that sounds cool, make a small game from it, accidentally expand that game far beyond its original scope, and then you have to cancel it because it doesn't have enough of a backbone to carry on to the end. It's been there since the beginning of game development history, and god only knows it'll be there when the sun collapses and obliterates us and our memories of "MARIO WITH A GUN V2.9." Of course, we think about those abandoned projects as trash that's not worth looking back on, but truth be told there can be some very interesting tidbits tucked away five folders deep. I've been making games for seven years now, and I will say with certainty that I have over 50 project files sitting around that were destined for mediocre reception on itch.io but never actually got there. Some of these projects are 2D, some are 3D, some are sneaky barnyard incest children of both, and others are made in 4D and require special goggles and an alien's brain to play without having a stroke. It's a confused bunch, but these games contributed to some very crucial tools and mentalities that have since shaped a lot of the workflow I use now. For example, a spinoff I made about my former friend's series of games contributed the backbone to what would become the Rush Player Controller. It might not seem significant, but those tools are the foundation for every single one of my first and third person games, including Cold Wick and Peeb Adventures. All of the unfinished games suffer from the problem I noted at the beginning. The initial scale was small, I hit that edge and wanted to do more, I pushed the scale of the game out onto a shaky wooden bridge, and then that bridge collapsed and I chose to abandon ship, run to the next bridge and shove another project to its inevitable doom. A constant cycle of believing I could improvise something entirely, messing that up, and never learning from my past mistakes. It was great for learning how to code better frameworks and to make new tools I would use from that point on, but ultimately it meant that I would never actually make games, just husks filled with memorabilia. Speaking of which -
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