For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 24.5 / 1000
Game Ideas: 126 / 1000
Target: 126
I failed the challenge of hitting 10 hours in less than a week. I wasted entire evenings. I’ve been beating myself up over it, which isn’t very productive or helpful. I will take specific steps to make sure I don’t squander great opportunities for making progress. It’s definitely more productive to ask what you can do to improve rather than worry about how much time you’ve lost.
I cleaned up some code, corrected possible bugs, and started working on the non-game parts of the game. I’m making slow progress. I am currently focusing on the introduction and menu states. I used to have the game immediately start in the PlayState. Now, the IntroState changes to the MenuState, and the MenuState changes to the PlayState. I’ll add functionality to those two states so that they do more than transition immediately. I’m actually not sure if I want to keep the IntroState. Some developers complain about intro movies, and I’ve played more than a few mainstream games that require about four or five clicks to get to the game menu. I’ve been looking at games like Tribal Trouble and Professor Fizzwizzle to see how they handle their introductions. Grubby Games doesn’t do much before getting to the Fizzwizzle menu, and Tribal Trouble hits it upon loading. Perhaps I can use it to setup the Kyra engine and the game window instead of doing anything fancy to declare, “Yes, this is a game by GBGames!” I can probably use it in the demos of my games to give incentives to buy.
I’m writing down some ideas for what I will want each state to do. For instance, do I just need the ability to load and display images, or should I add the ability to render text? Do I want particle effects? Fades? Do I want to be able to render the game in the intro screen, or should I not worry about how I am going to get the PlayState functionality out to some third class? For that matter, I see that I’ll need an abstraction of the Kyra sprite engine object since a number of game states will need to make use of it. I’m not sure how to do so without making it effectively a global variable. I’m questioning if my design is as solid as it could be.