Hi everyone! Game Off 2022 submissions are over, and I didn’t submit my game, Protagonist vs Antagonist. This blog post is about how I abandoned that project and moved on to a different one.
A couple of months ago, I started developing a 3D FPS game for the Game Off 2022 Game Jam. At first, it was going great, but later on, I flooded myself with overengineered ideas for simple problems and forgot that I needed to make a fun, playable game. I was excited for the project, as it was a genre that I had never tried before, and I thought I could learn from it. However, as time went on, I realized that I was drowning in my own imagination and the one-month deadline wasn’t enough for me. I abandoned the project because I knew that even if I finished it, it wouldn’t be an actual game, but a mass of overengineered game mechanics that could have been implemented in simpler ways. After abandoning the project, I decided to not join any more game jams and do things as I wished and at my own pace.
Shortly after giving up on Protagonist vs Antagonist, I came across a TikTok account and immediately started planning how I could turn it into a game. I quickly rolled up my sleeves to create a rock, paper, and scissors battle simulator with 1000 objects. It didn’t take long for me to create the game for web browsers and I published it on itch.io. This time, not only did I develop a fun game that people might actually enjoy, but I also learned a lot from the project. I used the profiler to implement my own optimizations to the game to achieve 1000 objects in WebGL. I tweaked calculations, instantiating processes, and Unity’s 2D physics. It was an awesome two birds with one stone project. I hate the idea of making a game just to add it to my portfolio. What’s the point of making a full game if players aren’t going to have fun? (Unless the goal is to replicate/improve/implement/demonstrate a game mechanic on a gray box level or something like that.) I wanted to make a complete game that people could actually play and have fun, and I did. I was a little angry at myself for abandoning Protagonist vs Antagonist, but it ended up better.
Now, for my next project, I’m making a 3D clone of the classic Snake game. Remember what I said about making a game just for the sake of it? This project won’t be a blatant clone. I think this is going to be yet another “two birds with one stone” kind of project.
This blog post is edited with the help of ChatGPT.