Diary of a would-be indie dev - Part 4

This is part of an ongoing series of articles originally written for the TIGSource forums

Part 4 - “Oh my god.”

Sitting down to write this article I’m blown away by the passage of time since the last one.  October 7th, 2007 was the date and I’m slightly embarrassed because I left my last article at the point where I was to actually get on and make my game, or at least a prototype.  So much has changed since then, not least my opinion and attitude towards game programming.

Recently I’ve setup some web hosting, started a blog and have been updating on a fairly infrequent basis on the progression of my game.  I thought it would be a good idea to add the articles I’d written for the TIGS forum so I dug them out and dropped them into the editor and through the process of cleaning them up (markup changes only ,) read through them again.  I guess, looking back, the first thing I should say is “You told me so.” more specifically, I was wrong.  Coming from a programming background with reasonable complexity, I’d assumed learning the language would be the major obstacle to learning to make games.  Many of the guys on TIGS were quick to tell me I was being too ambitious and games were not as straight forward as I’d assumed and frankly I didn’t pay attention.

I think looking back on my efforts now, and the advice I’ve been given, I really have to say that conceptually, game programming is massively different from application programming, when starting out you really need to listen to people when they say “Start with a Tetris/Match 3/Puzzle game”,  They know what they’re talking about.  Its not even the scale of the project, which would surprise you even for a small game like that, but the fact is a more complex project will draw upon concepts and code reliance that will assume you have knowledge in areas you wont.  I’m sure the guys that have helped me on numerous occasions are frequently frustrated when explaining things to me, that they have to explain the explanations!

As you can probably already guess, I quickly abandoned my dream project, the RPG -though its not been scrapped! The reality was that I’d hit the wall, as discussed in Part 2, and because everything was so daunting, I’d lost the will to code.  So, I decided to remake a simple puzzle game from the days when I had an Amiga 500 which was a lot simpler.  Atoms 2008 was born.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing when starting out is that there is a lot of code and planning required to get the simplest of things to show on the screen, even a small puzzle game has elements such as asset loading and handling, control code, graphic code, sound code, game mechanics, collision detection (or boundary checking in my case,) menu systems and more.  Each sounds reasonable enough, but they’re certainly not just a few lines of code each!

Anyway, before this becomes a post on my progress with Atoms 2008, I’ll stop.  The post-mortem on that will go up shortly after I release it to the public, source code and all.  For people who found this article outside of my website, my blog is http://games.leighashton.com and my Atoms 2008 codebase is hosted on googlecode where anyone can grab a copy of the SVN at http://atoms2008.googlecode.com

For those who might look through my code, you’ll see there’s a long way to go, I tell my friends that its close to release, and in my mind it is, all I need is to add sound, multiple players, a win/lose mechanism and some menus, then there’s a load of testing, that’ll be fun! (not)

Choosing a puzzle game is infact very good advice, something I’d urge anyone reading this  to do if they haven’t decided yet, it allows you to ignore many parts of normal game mechanics such as scripted events, ai, collision detection and more while allowing you to make something that can resemble a game, people looking through my code may notice some liberal misuse of code as I haven’t wanted to actually tackle certain stuff yet.

I’ll leave it at that for this instalment, hopefully this should be the last one before I release Atoms 2008, and the next will be a post-mortem of that followed by an article discussing where I go from there.