This week started off very promising, I had an idea I was excited about on Monday, and I felt like I could get the gameplay in by Wednesday evening. Polish and bugfixing could be done by Friday evening. I made a critical mistake however by working late on Wednesday, which caused me to be completely exhausted on Thursday. And on Friday, I realised I wouldn’t be able to finish my vision of the game by the end of the day, so my motivation was at rock bottom. Basically, this is another unfinished prototype, kind of like last week…

I wanted to make a top-down tilebased combat system, but with the twist that your character can mind-control enemies for the purposes of being able to use their weapons and abilities. Instead of a normal RPG where you have your own inventory, each enemy type was going to have their own specific melee and ranged attack. Mind-controlling an enemy would let you use these attacks, and interact with objects in special ways. For example, mind-controlling the scientist would let you interact with lab machinery, while mind-controlling the security guard would allow you to open security doors.

In retrospect, this was huge scope for a game to be made in 3-5 days, so I should have been more realistic about this at the time. I really should have picked one mechanic (the mind-control) and thought of a way to make an interesting game around JUST that concept. Instead, I built the mind-control mechanic in a way that depended on the combat system working. When I tried adding in turns and combat on Thursday, I actually felt pretty overwhelmed once I realised how much work it would be to integrate it with this mechanic. I didn’t think I’d be able to get everything done on time, and so I felt defeated. If I didn’t feel so defeated I could have been able to figure out a way to rework it, but I think I’m hitting a point with 1 Game a Week where I need to just take a break and rethink my process for making these games.

What went well

• I got the mind-control implemented in a simple way. I do still think this is a fun game idea, I just need a better prototype to confirm that.

What could have gone better

• Massive overscope
• Lost motivation after Wednesday and didn’t finish the prototype
• I didn’t follow my advice from last week, to get the gameplay loop working straight away early in the week

What I learned

• My energy on Thursday and Friday dips quite a lot compared to earlier in the week. I need to have the game shippable with programmer graphics by the end of Wednesday, otherwise I’ll start to stress and get overwhelmed on Thursday, which will just run into Friday.

Summary

I’m going to take next week off completely just to recharge and rethink my strategy. I’ve been disappointed with the last few games and it feels like I’ve been on a bit of a failure streak. In a way that’s fine, since these as are all prototypes. I would like to actually get a few wins though.

As always, if you want to try out the game (It’s not worth it!), the link is right here:

If you wanna play around with the code, I also have a link to the GitHub repo if you click here!