Piecemeal Jack - post 4 - wrap up

 I'm calling it quits on Piecemeal Jack for now. This is as far as I got:

I built everything I had planned, to some extent, and the result appears to be a game you could finish in less than 30 minutes. Granted, I haven't implemented the bosses, and damage isn't doing much, but I don't think adding either of these things will help extend the game beyond 30 minutes.

2 strategies come to mind for ensuring player's don't finish the game in 1 sitting: Slice up what I have and extend it out by adding 2 more levels, or ensure the game is so difficult that few players would be able to complete the game the first time they play.

I don't really like either approach at the moment, so yesterday I decided to put Piecemeal Jack aside. I don't see the point in paying for the production of art assets for what I have. I intend to return to this project some day in the future, but next month I plan to focus on things that would help me get a new job instead.

Piecemeal Jack has very much been a learning experience on when I should start talking about a project. I get so exited and, as with the registering of a domain, the paying for a website, and everything that happened with my past game projects, I think I rushed into showing off the idea. I don't think any of these things was strictly harmful to myself, but I believe it's hurt my ability to find and retain an audience for blogs, future games, etc. Honestly, I don't believe anything I've done to date is particularly interesting, and I've started asking myself why that is.

 

The next time I start on a game, I'm planning to stay silent on the whole thing until I've reached the point of adding art assets.

Piecemeal Jack - post 3 - Slowing way down

This past week was alot slower production-wise then expected. I returned to my day job, went through a few days of required overtime thanks to mismanagement or poor communication (can't ever tell which) between departments, and I used some of my free time to explore the Java programming language instead of working on Piecemeal Jack. That's a side effect of hating your day job: Sometimes, you just feel compelled to look into avenues that might lead to a better one.

 

As you might imagine, I was pretty tired in the moments when I did have time for Piecemeal Jack. So, instead of focusing on coding, I turned my attention to UI and game design. 

One of my favorite things about Godot is how easy it generally is to set up menus, with the catch being you have to know where a thing lives before you can do anything with it. Take the WorldEnvironment node underlined in the screenshot above, for example. Turns out, that's where brightness, contrast, and saturation settings live. Further, if you even want to use the settings this node provides in the 2D game, you have to switch Mode to Canvas under Background:

I can't say I'm much of a fan of this approach, but it seems to be working so that's good enough.

At this point I'm very worried about time. I've got a list of about 13 things left to implement code for or just start on, and I'm worried Thanksgiving won't be enough of a break for them all. My primary solution for this was to cut back hard on what I want this game to be, even if it hurts the end product. I've already cut one of the bosses, and I'm no longer planning to implement saving or randomness. I'm also thinking about giving myself the first few weeks of December for extra time, but I was really hoping to spend December diving back into programming in a way that might help me, you know, get a different day job.

The game world is coming together, at least. It's nice to be able to finally build it out after spending all of the rest of this month just making the pieces for it.

All of my hopes are on the Thanksgiving weekend. Until then.