Week 4 - Making progress

Happy new year! This is the fourth weekly post for Fish RPG.

My mindset regarding my own game development shifted this week in a way I consider positive. While there's still a long way to go, it feels good to focus my efforts towards a defined milestone (the vertical slice). Doing so has allowed me to justify leaving portions of Nibble (my game engine) undocumented, rigid, or poorly-optimized in favor of building towards additional playable content. More broadly, I feel myself thinking more in terms of multiple, smaller games over the course of months as opposed to getting mired in reworking systems for a hypothetical large, perfect game.

The cover image for this post demonstrates that, after roughly three weeks, the game is running again. From here, it's a prioritization game. There are a number of technical issues I must fix prior to release (including rendering of rigged objects and point light sources), but otherwise, I'm free to take shortcuts. For example, I intend to render Bubble (Spot's companion character) as a 2D overlay rather than a 3D model because the former uses systems I already have. I'd still like to rework Nibble's rendering systems, but I'm comfortable holding off until a future game.

To meet my initial milestones, I'd need to finish the vertical slice by the end of this week. Realistically, that seems unlikely, but I'm resisting the urge to drastically scope down, e.g. turn the vertical slice into the entire game (thereby giving me three extra weeks, i.e. doubling the duration of the alpha milestone). We'll see how the game shapes up this week and then I'll re-assess from there.