Nov 10 Status Update

This post comes after a month of nearly complete stagnancy on this project.

Early apps for college were due on Nov 1. I spent a long time cleaning up old work so that I could send in a code portfolio. A week after that, I gave a science presentation to the school. This meant that an entire 4-week block was totally consumed by other work.

This meant I had to face a harsh reality dead in the eye: I now have about 5 days to complete my game, which I was now weeks behind on.

I refuse to see this as a barrier towards completing my goal. If others can make games for Ludum Dare in 2 days, I can make this game in 5 days. Now that I have a lot of time freed up from college apps and my presentation, I’m going to spend 100% of my waking time just working towards this project.

Here’s my plan for the coming days (5 work days in total):

Day 1: Basic movement mechanics

I think it’s probably going to be important to establish early on how the game feels. The character’s movement speed and jump physics, whether or not the level wraps… These little things are often what make a game “feel good.” I want to start by ironing out as much of this as possible.

Day 2: Choice engine + splatter effect

Ever since the first day I touched this project, I knew I wanted to implement a splatter effect. This has been touched on many times before. However, I’m not really certain how to do this in Game Maker. I’m going to have to spend a solid amount of time researching how Game Maker works on a very low level.

Day 3: Game balancing + final iterations

I actually suspect that the hardest part of the whole development process will be neither the asset creation nor the mechanics programming, but the level balancing. I feel like it’s going to take quite a bit of time to, first of all, come up with an engaging and fair scoring system; and second of all, to come up with a reasonably difficult progression to support that system. This will likely require a lot of playtesting.

Day 4: Art + music

I can’t have a game that isn’t presentable. I’m going to spend a full day just on creating/finding/adding art and music assets.

Day 5: Documentation

It seems weird to set aside a day for documentation, but as of writing, this website still has no CSS. Documentation is just as important for my project as the project itself, so I plan to dedicate a work day towards it.

With this in mind, it’s time to see where the wind will take us.