While Not Finished, Start Again

I've drafted all of the Month of Games posts, even though some of the games aren't finished yet, although one of them has quite a bit of background that I've decided to split out here because there's a lot that's happened.

Long story short - I have abandoned quite a few projects.

I thought I could finish ETS - the game I attempted to make for the Ludum Dare earlier this year - if I spent a little bit more time with it.

It started off well. I was able to setup collision along all the walls, and position all the nodes in the node network. Then I connected the nodes together and got the connections to sever whenever a door closed since the path was now blocked, and got them to reconnect once the doors opened. Now I had to get the AI to actually use the nodes.

They would not.

They were able to find and move to the closest available node, but they would then decide to not continue to follow the rest of the path. I rewrote the code. And rewrote it again. Then I took a look at some code that Microsoft had done for pathfinding and implemented that, but they still loved to walk straight into walls thinking they were ghosts instead of using the doors that I'd very kindly setup for them.

I knew I was going to waste so many more hours trying to fix the AI, and joked I could probably make another game faster than it would take for me to finish this one. So that's what I decided to do.

A project that I had just wrapped up had a working mobile build despite the game originally not being designed for mobile, so I decided that this one would be for both PC and mobile from the start. And because I am crazy, I decided that the PC version would display horizontally but the mobile version would be vertical.

Deploying to my tablet was a bit of a hassle - either it would say there was an error deploying and then never tell me what the error was, or it would take a couple of minutes. Since I didn't want to wait minutes to test differences in layout, I added some debug code to let me trick my PC into thinking it was the mobile build.

The concept of the game was it was split into two halves - you'd get a small amount of time to memorise some button prompts, and then you would have to execute them in the right order at the right time. I had the memorise section working, and then abandoned it before finishing the second half because I didn't think it was going to work the way I imagined it.

The next idea was a fun game that I started making in Unity. The hardest part was supposed to have been creating models, but then trying to get the player input to work took hours and they still weren't even remotely close to how it should have worked, so that game got dropped too.

I wanted something simple. One thing that kept cropping up was the idea of a boss fight against Boris Johnson that was impossible to win. No matter what you threw at him, his healthbar would barely reduce (then a week later, IRL Boris did take a heavy bit of damage and yet it still wasn't enough as he's still spaffing everything up the wall). Then I thought about Keir Starmer Simulator where the objective is to stay on the fence for as long as possible.

I created a project for an air hockey game since that was a simple idea, but then I saw that I would need to write code to get the computer to hit the puck and if I was actually capable of getting an AI to move where it was supposed to, I wouldn't have reached this point.

The next project was a game where you keep selecting Recaptcha images which would start to show weird categories and eventually reveal that aliens were getting you to select images to let them learn about Earth culture to ready their invasion.

Another idea I had was Secret Baseball. That didn't develop beyond the name, which would probably have mixed baseball and secret basees.

The process of wanting to do something simple had me thinking about older games in an attempt to recreate them. Balloon Fight sprung to mind, so I started working on The Commute - an auto scroller where a worker jetpacks their way to and from work while avoiding other jetpack users and making sure they had enough fuel. This evolved into Jeff's Warehouse - it is set entirely inside a warehouse and you have to pick up boxes and take them to delivery points.

And then I dropped that one too. Last week. Just over 3 weeks before it was supposed to be released.

The game that replaced it is now pending review, which is good because now I can stop neglecting Game 3 (Game 4 should be complete by Wednesday at the latest, which is nice as that has required EFFORT).

Now I'm hoping I don't decide to scrap anything over the next week.

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