Starting on a side project

Well, I am making progress, and I am having a lot of fun. During one day, I have successfully started on a new game, pretty much finished the base game mechanics and added features and fixing bugs for the other game. I am not trying to show off, but putting it down in words makes it seem like a lot, especially for someone who has spent months doing absolutely nothing :)

Well, the title of the plan is "Planning something versus actually doing it". To break this down:

Planning something increases the chance that when you start on what you have planned, you do it right.

Actually doing something means that you throw planning out of the window, and starts coding like a programming droid.

Today, I was running into some problems in adding cracks to fall through in my maze game, which I have been working on for some time. Player passes the crack a couple of times, finally the crack opens and the player falls through, the level restarts. Not that complicated, but I managed to run into some problems none the less. It's pretty much fixed now, but that wasn't the point.

When I encountered the problems, and had spent about two hours trying all kinds of solutions, I fired up (insert online games directory here) and played some games, got stuck on one, thought about it for about five minutes, started working on it and had a working version up and running after five hours. Naturally, that means that it lacks sounds and graphics (unless you claim that rectangles of varying colors can be called graphics), but now I have something to work on when the mazegame is being a punk.


Looks familiar?

10 different car types with no animation needed, a backdrop, some interface and a logo... That pretty much sums up my art requirements for the game. Programming it won't be overwhelmingly difficult, it will mostly be the level design that will take my time. Sounds will be left to someone else, as will music. Some nifty particle effects like smog and such will also add a bit of atmosphere to the game. But of course, all of that lies long ahead of me, right now all I have is the game mechanics and some blocks on a screen ;)


Until next time,

Anders