Alright, so I’m back after my break last week, and I’ve made another prototype! Thankfully I’m publishing the game on Friday, so I’ll be able to relax on the weekend and get into the habit of pacing myself. Unfortunately, this prototype turned out badly. I think whenever I decide to make a 3D game with physics, that should be my cue to pick literally any other idea. I don’t really enjoy playing around with the Unity physics engine, it’s hard to make a game look good in 3D (at least it is for me), and I didn’t put much thought into the game’s design. I basically recognised all these problems during Ludum Dare a few weeks ago, and now I’ve ran into them again. So no more 3D Physics-Based games, I’ll leave them for other game devs and studios to make.

The biggest problem with making this game is I wasn’t particularly sold on the game concept itself. Instead of approaching this week with the idea of “Let’s make this cool idea and see what happens!”, I kinda just picked an idea and went with the mindset of “I just need to get a game shipped by the end of the week.” – I’m essentially making shovelware and it’s preventing me from engaging in my own work. I need to be excited about the game prototype I’m making, and to do that I need to be learning something new and to be sold on the idea. The game I made was essentially “Missile Command except you’re defending a port and you’re instead planting mines in front of boats.” – Very not cool.

The game went through a bunch of different ideas throughout the whole week and didn’t have a specific vision. It started as a boat racing game, then I pivoted to a trading game, then I pivoted again to this terrible Missile Command esque game. The game isn’t really “about” anything, there’s no reason for this game to exist other than as a lesson in “How to make a bad game”. So in that sense, I at least got value out of making it.

What went well

• Finished on Friday!

What could have gone better

• Lost motivation on the project very quickly as I didn’t have a game idea I was excited about.
• Game wasn’t in a shippable state by the end of Wednesday. This is a crucial milestone that I recognised on my last game.
• Didn’t have a game design that I could make to a decent standard this week without crunching. (I didn’t crunch! Yay!)

What I learned

• I need to focus on games from an “experience first” approach instead of a “mechanics first” approach. What do I want the player to experience, and then how do I make that happen? All the player will experience will this game is boredom, frustration, and perhaps schadenfreude.
• I need to decide on my vision for the game early. Decision paralysis doomed this prototype, as I couldn’t figure out if I wanted to make a racing game or a trading game or a defense game.

Summary

This week’s prototype was another failure, but at least I’m learning from these failures. I already know what theme I want to base my game off of next week, and I’m going to try a new approach of experience first design instead of mechanics first design. I’m going to use the “Core” design exercise by Rami Ismail to try and validate my design early in the process, so I can cut anything that doesn’t contribute to the experience early.

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!