Nikki @mno@gamemaking.social

gonna try to work on games again soon. it's been a couple weeks... I got that creative fire inside of me heating up

#screenshotwednesday

so called "virtual realtiy" gameing will never take off. why not? because it's not real. it's in the name. nice try, buckos, but it's completely fake

I'm participating in the tennis jam with everythingstaken https://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/node/11497

I'm hear to make video games and kick art, and I'm out of things to kick because video games arent art. arntart. artn't. ar not. vide ogaems are not they just are not there are none of them and now I have nothing to do since I am out of video games as well as art

I think the ideal form of trainwreck games is the concept being so semiotically embedded in the general conscious that you can just say a sentence hypothesizing a game and it immediately has the same effect on listeners as if the game were real and they just played it

until now I have been living under the assumption that Runescape is something only I experienced and everybody else forgot about it, but actually, the total playtime people have put into it must be many multiples of my lifespan to this point.

hundreds of Nikkis who spent their life clicking on that rock whenever the pixel colour changed to indicate it was ready to be clicked on again. countless Nikkis running in a line lighting tinderboxes. endless Nikkis waiting for a turn to chop the yew tree

I just had the realization that millions of people have played Runescape and I cannot understand this

during this scene, the UFO flies around in a circle and gets smaller as it approaches the planet.

it's done with just adjusting parameters to built-in functionality in Clickteam, as opposed to being figured out all by myself... but I still spent a while nitpicking with the settings, and it's ended up looking SO nice!

I finally took a big step for this game and started putting all the cutscenes into one frame, so that I won't have to copy the code and maintain it across separate frames

as usual when I take a really long time to plunge ahead, my preparations worked out as planned, and now I'm able to finally write more cutscenes to test them out!! I'm very excited for this game

screenshot saturday (click for full view)

new avatar! it's also by Mariken

in the first half of 2019, after a rocky start, and after having made games for 7 years now, I feel like I am _really_ hitting a stride wrt my growth as a developer. I am learning many new processes, and solving so many issues for my game development workflow.

but this also extends to myself, not just gamedev! I feel proud for being able to catch a negative thought train, and interrogate where it came from, to take it apart and argue against it. woohoo

the worst case scenario I can see is that after I release the game and the level editor and everything, is that some ppl enjoy playing it but skip some of the puzzles and nobody wants to make their own level sets.

that sucks, but I'd also be ignoring what I've accomplished for *myself*, namely:

- grid based puzzle game with two characters
- level editor that is very easy to modify
- level set utility program
- cutscene viewer w/ a revamped scripting engine

and I can reuse these!!

I thought of ways that the game could be made more clean, but all of them require extending it beyond my original scope into directions that ultimately just create more work, and more complexity, for me.

ie. larger levels for more space, a tile layer system like in Chip's Challenge, a broader diversity of tiles to fit more specific niches... they're good ideas, but not ones I _want_ to do here, and that's important for me to choose

I started feeling down about my current puzzle game in the works, so I put some time into figuring out *why*.

the main problem I identified is that it feels inelegant in practice, even though it sounded really good on paper. the cyclical state changes of tiles makes careful design to avoid softlocks surprisingly difficult. and playing it just feels very messy sometimes.

but that's okay! it's my first puzzle game *ever*, and I like to make messy games in the first place