So far, so good

It has been 13 days since I finished the previous game Pong, and my progress through the 20 games challenge marches on, this time with finishing up Flappybird. As my git history shows, work on this has been sporadic at best, but I feel I got a lot less stuck this time around than when developing Pong.

If I were to compare these two games I find it interesting that they are ranked as the same difficulty level in terms of development in the 20 games challenge, at least in my experience, Pong was a technically harder game to implement. The main part here is the multiple player controls, and the AI when playing single player. Flappybird on the other hand has a single input, the 'Flap' action, and requires no AI, is just single player and has no win-condition to keep track of. I guess the challenge in this game was that it has a lot more art than Pong has. In total I drew about 7-8 sprites and backgrounds for this game using a combination of Aseprite and Photopea, an activity I don't have much natural (or trained) talent in, but that I find relaxing and possible to do while listening to an audio book or watching a movie.

After the development of Pong I reflected a bit about a time where I got stuck trying to 'enterprisify' the menu system for the game, and how I eventually got out of that. This time I had much less trouble with this occurring,  I managed keep my cool and for the most part say that "if it works, it's done" and go on to the next task. Yes I had to rebuild a couple of things down the line, but in this small of a project it wasn't too bad. And leveraging Godot's signal system, things are naturally quite loosely coupled, so that also helps with refactoring.

I think the main lesson taken away from this project is a reminder that making things "good enough" is ok, and that spending a day just drawing was quite a nice activity to do in the middle of development, giving a break from the technical side of things.

All in all, I think finishing this game proves to me that I AM able to finish projects, and that the game development dream still isn't dead.

For some more thoughts on the process of developing Flappybird, check out these blog posts I posted mid-development:

• Doing something over nothing
• Flapping forward, hitting pipes along the way