Original Ideas

TL;DR; Developing even small games is not as easy as it seems. Even more when you have a dumb idea.

Making keycaps had always been an endeavor for myself. Gave me something to do. I posted them for myself to look back on when I wanted to see progress, but also to have some accountability. Eventually some people saw them, and then asked me to sell them (sometimes yelled at me to do so), but I was hesitant. Time went on and I figured I could have fun with selling them, so that’s what I did.

Fast forward a few years and figuring out new ways to have fun had become harder. Seeing people complain about RNG in the general raffle format, or the bots for an FCFS format, I wanted to find a skill based way to have a sale.

Some time in 2023, I went thru some intro courses to 3 popular game engines: Unity, Unreal and Godot. Maybe it was around the time of the Unity drama in 2023. In the past I had delved a bit into Pico8 but being so limited I think I was able to actually make a game or something resembling a game.

In mid-November (I think) I got the funny idea to make a game that would actually be a sale and to enter you had to play the game. To win the sale you either had to have a high score or some other “winning” metric for the game. I had no idea what to even make. Surely an original idea would be even worse, so I decided on a few older games to possibly clone. Drug Wars, Mario, Space Invaders, a whole bunch of ideas pop up.

As November ends and December starts, I begin actually starting to learn the process in Godot. It’s free and there are literally no issues “making money” off it in the way I am doing so that I wasn’t sure about with Unreal or Unity. As I try to get a grasp on the basic flow of creating a game and handling UI elements, I realize Space Invaders makes the most sense.

What I didn’t know when I started was that the version of Godot I started with was “new” and many of the working features of the previous version hadn’t been fully ported over. This is a foreshadowing. I start building out the game. A main menu, a game play loop, and restarting the loop. I build out a few API backends to handle gathering keycap data, handling high scores and a few other things. I spend time making sprites and stuff in Aseprite which is surprisingly pleasant to work with. I learn how to do sprite animation. That was neat and also relatively pleasant. I try to learn how to make some music but I realize after trying 20 different tools I just don’t get how to actually write music. Instead I learn about VSTs and proceed to recording myself making music, which was then filtered thru the various VSTs to not be as dumb. Maybe some day I actually learn how music works, or at least how creating it works.

I had already decided from the start that I’d be hosting the game on Itch since it seemed to just make sense to do. What I didn’t know at the time was that the version of Godot I planned on using was not ready to compile HTML5 games in any working format. While locally developing, I was able to compile and test the game without an issue, so I had no thought to try to actually push builds to Itch. A month goes by, I have a somewhat working game loop and push a build. It doesn’t even load. Just non-stop errors. After a bunch of researching, I realize I need to go back to a previous version of the engine. At that point I kind of just want to not bother finishing any of this.

Throughout the process of doing this, I had been talking with a friend who lives in the game dev world. Mostly just as sanity checks since I didn’t want anyone in the keyboard space really knowing about it. After a decently long conversation about all the crap that I came to realize, I somehow got curious how long it would take me to rewrite everything I had done so. A few scenes only took about 20 minutes and I didn’t feel as bad as I had before. Talking to people, or even just sending messages to a wall, seems to sometimes fix those feelings. Maybe I should get a rubber ducky as a pair programmer or something.

Rewriting what I had already completed ended up actually being more fun than I had thought. It also let me refactor a lot of stuff that I just managed to get working which was neat. There were some things I hadn’t managed to solve in the original building, which I did get to work after. That felt cool. I think that’s the general sentiment I feel about creating anything. Art, programming, whatever. Seeing something you made actually realized in the way you see it in your brain is pretty satisfying. This has been the sentiment for the last 3.5 years. Making stuff is cool. Everyone should try.

During the 2 months I spent making this “sale” I woke up many nights at 3am and thought up things to fix, or a workaround or some other thing related to it. Or the time I decided to get dinner in the while it being real cold out, started my car and as I was walking out the door realized how to fix something and spent the next half hour doing so. It’s nice to have a project to work on, but not so much when you have no clue what the end goal really is. It just comes down to doing it, or trying to do it, and trying not to have a deadline of when I wanted it to be done by.