Failing

I have decided to cancel my develop a game in a month project for a number of reasons.

First I was suddenly busy at work leaving less time to develop, This happens sometimes and it is unfortunate it happened in a month where I did not want it to happen. It also has meant that when I was at home my coding mojo was low from intense day of thinking. Making progress even slower.

Second the game I was writing was not turning out to be much in the way of fun. Harsh I know but the game-play just is not there, given I am quite a way into the month restarting is probably not a good idea :)

The Third reason is the number of sprites required is too much for me to produce in the time frame. I have got better at producing sprites but I find animating them hard and very time consuming.

I guess this is a case of biting off more than I can chew in the time frame I have allowed myself.

Rather than plough on and feel sad about what I am producing I have decided to quit.

While I have failed with the main objective it is not hard to find some good points about the past two weeks.

I gained some experience with Tiled, a tile map creation tool. It is pretty easy to use and has a JSON exporter so integration with a HTML5 game is pretty easy. This tool is something that I plan to use in other games where possible.

Coding wise I am happy with my gvim setup , the game ended up with about 900 lines of code some of which will make it into my little reusable library. I have moved over to using JQuery rather than Sizzle just so I can use some it its power in the front end. Overall writing code is not the hard part

My arch nemesis is art. I am just still not good enough at making art. That is good in the sense being fast enough at it or producing artwork that even I find acceptable and I have low standards. Basically I need to practice and so I shall.

As artwork is my major stumbling block for the next couple of small games I produce I shall start by getting a significant amount of the artwork produced before I start coding. This will be good practice for me in terms of making artwork even if it turns out the gameplay is not great.

So where now. Over the next two weeks I plan on fiddling with my codebase a little bit to make sure I have extracted out the re-usable parts of the endevours of the past few weeks. Drawing, perhaps with a bit of pen and paper, and pondering some simple game designs.

I am also tempted to do an update to some of my android apps.