This week was nothing but frustrating. I came very close to tearing down most of the game and re-building it. The idea sounded natural and good, but it wasn’t. I was kind of in a state of limbo. I have been working on this game for quite a bit of time. Everyone always said the last 20% is no joke. Now I can clearly see why. Yyou start to sit there questioning a lot of things. You question things like is this good enough? Is this worth continuing? Those that have worked on projects for a long time tend to ask themselves the same questions. Now I know why most people never finished making the games they had originally sought out. They completely burned out or just let their negative thoughts consume them. It almost happened to me. So what happened?
I’m a beginner
I consider myself an accomplished programmer. I have been doing it for well over 15 years professionally. Game programming was nothing something I was accustomed to. Sure, the programming part I knew I wouldn’t have an issue with, but it was the multitude of other things that go along with making games like
- Graphics
- Music
- Sound Effects
- Marketing
- New Technology
- Knowledge
- Blog Updating
- Keeping in touch with the Gaming Community
- Time
There are many other facets that go along with making games. These are some of the major ones that I can think of off the top of my head. The fact that I am a beginner is the reason why this project has been taking so long. There is so much out there to learn and when you think you know it all, there is something else lurking around the corner that needs to be learned. It is a continuous process. I never thought once in my life that it would have taken this long to build something like this. Being the beginner is not that easy and one can simply fall by the wayside if you let things get to you.
The call for help
Sometimes we all need a little boost. We all need a little advice and some of those secret words of wisdom that inspire us. We all do and it is perfectly OK. I needed some help. I took to the /r/gamedev boards where I talked about two major kinks in my game that were pushing me to start over.
Level design
I took to reddit to pose a question about level design. The more I researched the topic of my game the more I saw that people were creating level editors to build them out. I originally thought to myself saying that there is no way in hell that I would need such a thing. The problem was that my level coding was getting extremely bloated and almost getting to the point of being non-manageable. It was frustrating adding just a couple of things and by the time I finished coding it, I didn’t like it anymore or didn’t like the way it was doing what it was doing.
The grand consensus was that I should be building a rudimentary level editing system that would alleviate the strains of hardcoding it into the game itself. The idea itself made sense, but I didn’t really know where to start. It was back to the drawing boards and I have finally come up with a solution for it. Now I just have to build it and that is my current task for the weekend. The level editor will be built with HTML / Javascript / JQuery. It will simply build out the levels in JSON format that can be read by Objective-C and then translated into the precise movements, behaviours, colors, etc for the level.
Programming flaws
Remember I said I was a good programmer? 
Well, I am, but at times we all step into shit here and there. The fact that I am a beginner at game programming is the biggest problem. I knew absolutely nothing in the beginning when I started to program this game. I would read, code, test, and code again until something worked. As time went on I naturally become more proficient in things. What was happening was that the older stuff that I had worked on when I first started was really not done the correct way. The process had become putting band-aids on top of band-aids. This is when I took to reddit again to ask some advice about rewriting my game the correct way.
The support and responses I got back were insurmountable. Some of the smartest people in the industry have discussed what I was going through and that they have all done the same thing in the past and in some ways continue to do so now. It was pretty cool knowing that I wasn’t the only one going through this type of thing. I was very close to refactoring the entire game and starting over. In the back of my mind I knew it wasn’t a good idea. I knew it would take a tremendous amount of time to do and a lot of the folks giving me advice said there would be a good chance I would be back to where I started out with but with a different game That wasn’t enticing at all. I took a couple of days off from programming to build out a plan of attack.
Plan of attack
I am not going to be restarting this game. What I have decided to do was unplug the bad pieces of code and refactor them. I will continue this process until I am satisfied with the results and things are working the way I want them. The second biggest thing which I discussed above was building a level editor. This will reduce the stress and complexity of trying to hardcode it in the game itself and give me more of a visual of what the levels will look like instead of trying to imagine what is going on. I have cut down a lot of the features I wanted to put into this version and did so because I want to release this game. Personally, I think it is a lot of fun and I would much rather complete something, get it out to the public, and at the same time concurrently work on future updates to the game where I can release monthly updates. That is my plan. My plan is to finish this game. My plan is for all of you out there to friggin enjoy playing what I have created.
Peace out, folks!
