11 DEC 2021:
This week I learned some important lessons in game development:
#1: Sometimes you need to take a step back before you can move forward.
I had this idea that the fighters would launch in semi-random waves of about 5 fighters per wave. Initially things were going well, but then I found some bugs with ships not behaving properly. Furthermore, the fighters were now way too powerful and the game wasn't fun anymore.
So I scrapped the fighters.
At least that version of them.
The fighter code alone was 1500 lines, so it simplified things significantly. But more importantly, it gave me an idea for a more efficient way to handle enemies in the rest of the game. As a test, I tried this idea on a few other enemies and liked the results.
#2: Pay yourself before paying others applies to time as well.
If you've been following this devlog, you know that I've been working on this game for almost 2 years now -- bearing in mind that I nearly started from scratch early this year. Part of the delay is because of my sometimes very busy job in addition to my other obligations.
You've probably heard the saying "Pay yourself, before paying others." Well this week I found that the same thing applies to time.
I'll explain.
Up to now, I was mostly working on Scrapship AFTER I got home from work, with the unsurprising result that I wasn't "fully charged" to give the game my 100% effort. Some days I would only put in about 15 minutes a day. :(
So I changed that. I adjusted my sleeping schedule to wake up at 0530 every morning. By 0600, I'm well awake and this gives me a solid and deathly quiet hour to work on Scrapship.
I've been most impressed with the results so far.
Like I said, I deleted the fighters, but in turn I also got the shield fighters pretty much in their final state. And the same concept I used with the shield fighters will be used for all the other enemies as well. Now I just need to apply it across the board.
#3: If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well
Some developers have an attitude of "I'll ship it now and fix it later. " Here I may be a bit old-fashioned. You see, back in the 80s and 90s, the era of the NES and SNES, game developers didn't have the luxury of patches or fixes after a game shipped. The game had to be pretty much flawless on release day. Very minor bugs of course may have been inevitable, but there would almost certainly be no game-crashing bugs.
You only get one shot to make a first impression. And if your first impression is a half-baked game, then it's very unlikely that people will be eager to try a fixed version.
A good talking point here is the game No Man's Sky. I was really looking forward to this game when it first came out. But then it did and I played it -- and I was very underwhelmed and disappointed. Supposedly No Man's Sky has made astronomical improvements since then, but I honestly haven't had the urge to bother with it again. Again -- you only get one shot to make a first impression.
So as far as a release date for Scrapship, it'll be done when it's in a very polished state. Polished, not perfected. I'm trying very hard not to be a perfectionist here. But the simple matter is that right now Scrapship has a lot of MUST-HAVES that need to get done before it's ready for some sort of demo or beta.
I have been restricting my vision on this game. Some players have asked for gamepad support. Others have asked for multiplayer. Others have asked if it will be on Steam. Obviously if I do all of these things the development time is going to extend by quite a while. But even without these things, I 'm confident that Scrapship is going to be a very unique "shmup". It won't be the kind where you micro-dodge bullets and have to memorize level layouts to get a 1CC clear. If things work out as I envision them, the enemies will react frequently to how the player is doing. Is the player struggling? The difficulty will automatically lower. Is the player a pro? The difficulty will ramp up accordingly.
There are two possible outcomes I see with Scrapship: I can release it very hastily and "fix it later", but I fear the reaction will be, "You spent two years working on a game that's this buggy?!" Then of course I would have few downloads and I would feel like my time had been mostly wasted.
Or . . .
I can delay release until I am happy with it. I may have lost a few impatient followers along the way, but at least when someone does play it, they'll be able to say, "Wow, this game is really good!"
Quote of the Week:
"You won't always be motivated, so learn to always be disciplined."
Thanks for reading this (much longer!) devlog and have a great rest of your week!