It’s been a while since I’ve written on this part of my website, and I sincerely apologize! I’ve been working on games for the past two years on my own time, and these DevLogs were once a source of information and insight on part of my process, but since then I’ve had health issues and I’ve thrown myself more into my day job, reducing the time I have to make personal projects, thus making the idea of taking extra time to write about what I do even less appealing.
The last two big(ger) projects I had worked on were Sweet Home On The Hill and Progress-Ions. Both failed, I think, for the same reason, and that’s because I didn’t focus enough on the core mechanics and their polish. Progress-Ions stung the most for me, because I really enjoyed the style I had managed to pour into that project and the basic ideas seemed good. At some point I realized that my core gameplay loop was bad and the main mechanic (clicking on tiles) became irrelevant at some point and just wouldn’t work. That deflated my enthusiasm for the project quickly.
My personal project of the moment is called Wait Until The End Of Time; Like Progress-Ions, it’s an idle game, but perhaps more influenced by titles like NGU Idle and Wizards And Minions Idle that I had played in the past. The core idea is that you accumulate Time in various forms, starting with Seconds, then Minutes, Hours, etc. All to discover what lies at The End Of Time. Each time unit has its own mechanic, and they all blend into each other.
I’m trying two things for the development of this project, the first one is being keenly aware of what I would call “Anti-Design” (which might not be a correct term in the field of design itself, but that’s just how I see it), gameplay mechanics that just contradict each other in unfun ways, going against the normal flow of progression, or just feel like they are plain broken. The other thing is not to burden myself with creating content before it’s needed. Meaning, for instance, that if I want to create a system where you can fight up to 100 different enemies, but realistically when you start interfacing with that system you can only fight 5, I shouldn’t try and design all 100 immediately. I remember doing that in Sweet Home On The Hill, inventing twenty six special abilities while only making two or three work and be useful for the portion of the game I had made.
I’ll try to DevLog some more in the future, but no promises :)
