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.
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