Retrospective

It's been a while since updating this log as I've gotten caught up in too many things since last semester. Alas, I wrapped up last semester with a week of flu-fueled frantic work where my entire household (myself included) came down with the flu. I ended up finishing what I set out to do over the course of the semester, which was to complete a concept doc, a game design doc, a macro, and a prototype. These can be accessed here. By the end of the semester I felt like I came to experience things I was warned about in feedback I received throughout the semester — things such as the project being quite large in scope and the subject matter making for a potentially niche audience.

Over winter break I did some light polish, and this semester I picked things back up under a new independent study, this time focused on implementation rather than design.

The bulk of the work since then has been level building and environment. I've been learning Blender and Photoshop to solidify an asset creation workflow for low-poly style assets, and I set up the project with TrenchBroom for quick level design. A demo level with a tutorial system was added to give new players a guided introduction to the mechanics, which has surfaced what I think will be the defining challenge of this project: communicating the concepts within the game. BFT is complex, and it's hard to convey how it works without shoving a wall of text down the player's throat. This is something I'll have to carefully work through and iterate on for the entire lifetime of this project.

I've also come to realize this project is going to take a long time. Around my second week of heavy implementation I had a bit of a crisis, sparked by not seeing much visible progress after putting in a lot of work. I felt like the concept was too complicated and bloated — and honestly I still do, a little. It's something I'll keep in mind as I keep building. A piece of advice you hear constantly from developers is to distill your concept down to the smallest possible thing, and this project is pretty much the opposite of that.

All of that said, I'm learning a lot. Even if this game takes forever to reach a finished state, the process itself has been worth it.