Indie game dev blog part 2: The Basics

Hi!
So I've done some work on the indie game! I am going to post some stuff about what I've done so far, even though it's still very very bare-bonesy. Like, I haven't even programmed past basic platforming yet.
Still.

The game I've been working on is title-less at the moment, but it's about the elements. (The Fire Water Air Earth elements, not the Oxygen Helium whatever whatever elements.) Video games have NEVER involved the elements before!!!
But I do plan on being more clever about it. It's puzzle platforming. You get different powers based on which element you have equipped, and those powers interact with the environment in different ways. I don't really want to go into that too specifically yet, because I don't really know how it'll work too specifically yet.

I've got some CONCEPT ART, though!Regular dude, Earth dude, Air dude, Fire dude, Water dude. Probably I will change my mind about the fire dude again, he looks a little janky, but lizards that are associated with fire (salamander) don't have that many interesting features, or at least none that I have the skill to exaggerate for a tiny sprite. And chameleon eyes are cool. Also the donkey kong-ness of the earth monkey dude might be a little too stupid, I might change that. Fuck, I might change it all.
Anyway, the colours are relevant, and I've tried to give them different head shapes (except the fire dude, I now notice. dammit.) so that you can tell them apart in silhouette. In case I ever need to use silhouettes.

Oh, also: here is what the actual game looks like right now.
the coloured blobs are to change your element with, and the black blobs are the floor. the stairs on the right is to test how high the dude can jump. it's all very exciting. The dude drops water when he is the water element! and they make the blocks wet! but this was before I decided on the animal head design, it probably won't do that in the end probably.
But yeah, this is where I'm at, a week in. I'm gonna try to do some animations today, and some programming tomorrow.
I am still very excited about this whole thing! It's such fun!

Indie game dev blog part 1: The Rules

Ok, that last post was the product of sleep deprivation, a couple beers and like 4 coffees. I was a little bit out of it, but the sentiment is still accurate. I am going to try to make an indie game, and I am going to try to do it well. Just for my own sake, I'm gonna set myself some ground rules so I don't end up doing no work or doing a fuckload of work for nothing.
RULE 1: The game should be playable ASAP. I've tried to make games before but I tend to get lost in the design process long before I've made anything that you can play. I'll take the concept of a platformer RPG, and turn it into a randomly generated story with 100 characters and 1000 story elements and it just starts to get a little crazy. So following Derek Yu's (of Spelunky and Aquaria) ideas from Finishing a Game, and start the damn game and try to make it into something I can show other people quickly, so I don't get lost in feature creep.
RULE 2: I should work on it for at least a few hours a week. I'm at uni, I've got a social life, and I have an extremely active reading articles on the internet schedule. There's always an excuse not to do something you wanna do. So I'm gonna set aside a couple hours a week, at least, to do some work on the game. Coding, drawing, whatever. At least if I stick to a schedule then I'll more easily be able to tell what is within my own limits as a developer and what's realistically within my own limits as a dude who has shit to do.
RULE 3: I gotta try to do as much of it as possible by myself. I know people that are better programmers than me, better artists than me, and better writers than me, but what I want to do here is try to make something on my own. Again, part of this process is just to realise what my own limits are. If it becomes overwhelmingly difficult immediately, I know it's probably a lost cause and I should recruit some people that know what they're doing better, but I've gotta at least give it a go. The only thing that I already know immediately is that I'm gonna be useless in the sound/music department, but I got hell of musically inclined mates so that should be no bother.
RULE 4: I can't put any code into the game that I don't understand. There are a ton of tutorials and example projects out there for Game Maker. I've taken chunks of different people's tutorials and messed around with them a little and shoved them into a game before without really understanding them. But I don't wanna do that anymore. If I'm gonna get any better at programming, I've got to understand what the code is saying, so if I do take any coding ideas from other people (which I will probably have to, given how little I know about coding), I've just got to make sure that I understand what it means before I put it in the game. Ideally, I'll look at the code, learn what the individual parts mean, and rewrite it myself.

So yeah. Those are the rules that I thought of between my incoherent post yesterday and this hopefully more coherent post today. Probably I'll keep posting to this blog when fun new things develop with the development. I've got a bunch of cool ideas for games, and I'm really excited to actually get to work on them and show them off.

Oh also if you've got any other ideas for ground rules I should set myself, tell me in the comments! I am going into this basically blind, so any advice is good advice.

I am going to make an indie game

Clearly I haven't made much of an effort to keep up with this blog, but I don't really care because it was basically just an excuse to see if I could keep up with a blog. Which I could not. But maybe now I will be able to!

I plan on developing an indie game.
I love video games, and I think about video games all the time.
In the summer, I made a prototype of a platformer where everything was white noise. It wasn't excellent, and it wasn't that clever, but I did it and it wasn't hard.
Recently I watched a video on Giant Bomb with an interview with the guys developing Bastion, and when asked "what do you know now that you wish you could impart to other indie devs out there?" they said "that you can just start." and I can! and I will! I can do basic programming in game maker, and with some work, I can probably do some complicated programming in game maker!
I listened to a lecture by Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) and it really got me thinking. I really think that I have at least a couple of games in me that can totally resonate with people. More than that, I really think that I could make those games.

I've got a few ideas on how to do this thing, on what rules I should set myself to make sure that I get this done. But that's another story for another blog post. This post is about setting my plans forth in the sacred internet tablets so that I can't take it back. on a blog that nobody reads.

but yeah. I'm gonna fucking do this shit. It's gonna be good.