Growing Pains

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read the ramblings of a solo dev (even though calling myself that feels like stolen valor). This project really took a lot just to cross over the prototype line I set for myself at the beginning of summer.

The Good

I learned a lot of new skills and structures over the course of this project. I was introduced to resources and their uses in Godot.  Modularizing things like attacks, so that I can just create a new attack by making a new resource instead of hard coding the details, was an invaluable tool in this project. Also I learned more about inherited nodes and classes (and how I was using them incorrectly). 

There is a lot of foundation building that goes into a game of this genre that was more than I initially thought. I was up to the challenge however and the building blocks of the game are usable. The menus are actually serviceable and almost halfway decent (relative to my other projects).  I believe that my UI has improved slightly overtime. However I am limited by the fact that I have a poor eye for aesthetics (lol).

The Bad (this really shouldn't be longer than The Good)

The way the animations and attack messages work are a patchwork job. They exist secondarily to the main meat of the prototype. A similar things happened when turns were being made (in code). Also buffs are currently permanent because at the point I thought to write buff expirations, there was too many things entangled within the system to just change that one thing. Things like this being an afterthought has caused a pile up of technical debt that I am in no way going to handle anytime soon.

I did not plan the architecture of my code out properly. This is slightly due to a general unknowingness of how a game like this is structured on a mechanical level. The other portion was just blindly copying how like 3-5 other people (youtube tutorials) did it with no thought given to why that specific design informs the specifics of the game.

The Ugly

I lost sight of the main goal of the prototype. Which was to come up with a turn based system with a shared resource. This definitely affected which directions I worked towards in my development, henceforth slowing it down. Even as I type this now it is still not 100% finished (as of 7/17), because the whole system is still lacking proper rewards for winning the AE sub game. 

Lessons and the Future

I need to set legitimate goals for my prototypes in the future. If the whole prototype revolves around a feature I need to hone in on developing (and iterating) on said feature.  I also need to plan out the foundation ahead of time so that building it does not take up as much time as it did (>70% of the total time).

• Actually finish AE system, with unique traits for every character
• Improve architecture of code and settle some of the technical debt
• Expand sound and VFX