Baby steps

I've been trying to start game development for quite some time now, with project after project being started on with great gusto and eagerness, just for that motivation to be blown away after a few days/weeks because a combination of lack of experience in game design, not familiar enough with the tools at hand, and most of all the deep pit of scope creep.

As a senior software developer and avid video game enjoyer, I figured I could pick up game development without meeting too many hurdles, at least on the technical side of things. I expected the biggest issues I would have was on the art and audio side of things, but as failed project after failed project has shown, I was living a lie. I probably have about 20 unfinished Godot projects  a handful of Unity projects, at least 3 c++/OpenGLprojects, and more non-game c# projects than I can count gathering dust in the bowels of my computer. Forget not finishing first, I apparently don't finish at all.

In my professional life I do mostly back-end .Net development for clients large and small, with some infrastructure and operations work on the side. It's full on enterprise most of the time, with all that follows that good and bad. I often end up in a position of cleaning technical debt, creating standards, building in-house tools and libraries, making frameworks, and generally working towards the impossible: "The perfect code". It never ends up perfect, but I get to pretend while I work that it will end up that way. This approach to development is working fine in the environments I frolic in between 9 to 5, Monday through Friday, but when that same brain tried to take up personal projects the house of card crumbles. The result? Fields of dust bunnies.

What I am getting at here is that I always end up either out of scope, or so far outside my knowledge that I don't even know how to progress and end up scrapping or abandoning almost all my personal projects. For the games I've tried building, I always set myself up for failure by going after a game design for a game I want to play. Why do I do this? Well it's the most common answer to "how do I get started with game development?". The philosophy is as follows:

"Just make the game you would want to play. Just start building it, and just build it one step at a time."

That might work for many, but not for me. I simply cannot build the games I want to play, because the games I want play are too complex for me to give a reasonable scope, build and at the same time learn the tools I'm using (this might be skill issues, but it's my reality regardless). I often end up down the wrong rabbit hole implementing something using the wrong tools in the wrong way. My progress grinds to a halt, and I have dug so much of this rabbit hole that turning back seems almost inconceivable. Of course I recognize this as the classic sunk cost fallacy, and in a professional setting I usually deal just fine with this, but when it's just myself that holds me responsible, and I have no meaningful deadlines, the get out clause "Meh, this project isn't fun anymore, let's do something else fun instead" is readily at hand.

Then I found the 20 games challenge. This was a totally different approach than what I had been trying so far, simply ignore what I would want to play, and focus on using predefined, curated game designs to learn the tools and strategies I need to build my own games one day. To add to the arsenal of aids that could keep my projects in check scope-vise I also decided to force myself to use a well defined backlog and task board, and write individual tasks for everything I needed to do. Whenever a feature or task became overwhelming, I would try to split it into multiple more manageable tasks (I know, revolutionary thinking right here). I'd been hesitant to do this before, as I was afraid it would feel too close to work, but since my previous approaches didn't work out I might as well give it a go.

And it worked! Somewhat at least. The first game on the list is the classic Pong, originally released in 1972 by Atari for arcades, and probably one of the most cloned games ever.

Development started great, and I was very diligent with writing and completing tasks with a well defined and small scope. It allowed me to leave the computer after each development session feeling that I wasn't in the middle of something, and almost made it so motivation wasn't even a factor any more. Sitting down and picking up a task was very easy. An example of how small a task could be was "Record a simple sound for when the ball hits something". Beautifully simple and easy to do; I just ran around the house with my phone recording stuff hitting other stuff until I found a sound I liked, dragged the sound file into Audacity, learned JUST enough to understand how to cut down the soundbite to just what I needed, and exported it.

Then when I was about 98% done (or 80% as I thought at the time) with the game, I fell back into my old habits, and everything immediately ground to a halt. I got it in my head that I wanted to add a settings menu, accessible from both the main menu and the pause menu.
Buttons were added, but even before I got to designing the Settings menu itself, I stupidly said to myself; "With all of these menus, and now with one menu being access from two different parts of the game, surely this needs to be centralized into a MenuManager of some kind. And while I'm at it, all of these menus share quite of lot of base functionality, like being opened, closed, and possibly having a previous menu it should go back to when closed. Let's create a base class just called 'Menu', and have all the menus inherit from this." 

I know.

Trust me, I know.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Because of this relatively simple, intrusive thought, I ground this simple Pong project to a halt for almost 2 weeks. I quickly over complicated everything, made changes in large parts of the game files, and once again felt the boredom and frustration creep in. Of these 2 weeks, the last of them I didn't even open Godot. The dust started gathering.

Then today, literally the same day as I'm writing this, I finished my game, published it, and wrote this little retrospective article. How? The algorithms recommended this amazing video from the BPS.shorts YouTube channel about personal engineering projects. I urge you to watch this, especially if you are stuck with any project. The main points I took away from this was a lesson in scope and scope creep, knowing what is worth investing time in, where to take shortcuts or even cut out features completely, and what really matters. What really matters most of the time, and what was the point of this whole exercise of the 20 games challenge was for me to COMPLETE PROJECTS.

So in the span of about 2 hours, I reverted ALL of the current changes I had since my last commit to git, deleted 3 tasks (settings menu, menu management, and player controller scheme selection). I opened 3 new tasks:

1. Remove settings buttons from all menus.
2. Hard code player control schemes, only allowing keyboard controls
3. Publish game in itch.io

It's 21:44, about 3 hours after I reverted my changes and deleted the old tasks. I only added one more task at the end: "Write a dev-log". The game is published, and playable both single and multiplayer in the browser, and I'm reaching the end of this article. I did it. I finished my project. It is possible.