Long time no blog post. There hasn’t been too much to report other than I’ve been a little more consistent lately with Machine. I’ve been also trying ADHD medication but it’s hard to tell if it’s working at times, it’ll take awhile to figure out the correct dose or the right drug. At the very least it keeps me awake and motivated all day. Whenever I switch to a new work ethic I need to actually stick to it which is only really knowable after 2-3 months if it’s actually working. Rather than the initial excitement and optimism leading to early conclusions.
Still though this one method seems to be working for a month long so far. I make a todo list of things I should do next. Then I check them off and date the time of finshing the task. Then I write new ones and it sort of becomes a procedural todo list to look back on rather than to be overwhelmed with what’s forward. I’ve been aiming for about a room per day, but there’s of course going to be gaps between the days due to life and a full time job. The trick is to make sure I don’t let it slip too much. My problem is not realizing it's been days since I last worked on the game due to distractions and always looking forward to the weekend to get work done, the cycle then repeats when I keep skipping weekdays and don’t realize how bad the gaps are.
Old District
Right now I’ve been remapping the area right after the demo. It had been done for years but I feel like it just wasn’t up to par with the demo and I have a better idea for the formula of making the connecting layouts for rooms. I had an ambitious idea for the flow of the game but I think it’s better to make the “golden path” first then worry about the optional areas later. This has been the sort of thing that has been stumping me on being more efficient on “what to do next” because the layouts often loop back into each other to bring more purpose to each room, but can often require a lot of thinking ahead. I wish Game Maker had editor “notes” you could put in the actual room to remember for later.
New District (WIP)
The area I’m revamping a bit is called the Quad City District, I felt the original space somewhat lacking so I wanted to make it feel more like a city and that there’s some semblance of locales. Though really I’m realizing how barren some of the level design is compared to the demo content. So really the goal is to keep the density consistent and definining what's "good enough" to get the ball rolling. There’s also a bit more story added to give more interest or direction to the game (and by proxy helping me focus on what the player’s actual goal is). Still though I want to keep the atmosphere very lonely and derelict, so there’s only one other alive character in the entire game. I'm curious as to how he'll be received.
The biggest boon lately is the new debug terminal my friend Jeff has set up. This allows me to make quick adjustments while testing and it really seems obvious to have but I had no real patience myself to make tools to make dev easier and smoother. It’s a catch 22 especially with people who make their own engine. Any time spent saving time is potentially losing time. With someone else handling it I avoid that issue. This might sound obvious in hindsight, but it really does help with jumping back into gamedev not having to spend an extra minute fiddling with the editor. On top of that I’ve been meeting Jeff every Sunday to review what direction we should be heading in. If I run into a dev issue that’s slowing me down, we look into making new commands that can help me better. This is really under the hood stuff that’s not reflected in the final result but hopefully provides some insight on what I'm going through.
I’ll try to keep the blog posts monthly again to update how this work process shakes out, but I'll also update with some more behind the scenes history of the project.