Development and Dinosaurs
Riding the wave of new year motivation and getting as much of this game done in as short a time as possible before I lose steam.
It’s been surprisingly easy using Godot, despite the fact that there’s a lot of old information for Godot 3 out there and I’m using Godot 4, but the documentation has been pretty good and there’s quite a few good tutorials available out there too.
I’m trying to avoid the trap of “Huh, I think this could be better if I do xyz” and just getting something working, because it doesn’t matter if I have the most beautifully decoupled event bus that drives all the actions in my big ol’ state machine if it doesn’t actually see any use, right? So I’m going quick and dirtyish to get things working, and once I’ve done something ugly enough times I’ll probably have more experience which gives me a better chance of being able to fix it. And then I can just do the right thing in the next game, not that I’m thinking that far ahead yet (I totally am).
I can foresee a problem already, as both of my children now want to create their own games too, and I don’t have enough willpower to avoid them for too long. Right now they’re writing “game design documents” which gives me a little bit of time before I have to pause.
Anyway, so it’s an idle game, which means I don’t have to do a lot of the hard stuff I’ve struggled with in previous games, and have made a bunch of progress! Check this out, I’ve got a UI with a bunch of stuff on it, and some kind of cool stuff inside it too. No actual gameplay yet but that would be a good idea to add at some point I guess? I did add some of the “story” too, but still need to think of a way to tie everything in together.
I’m leaving things rough and ready until I’m at a point where the game is properly playable, then work on the polish. That’s smart because that means I’ll have a game at that point and won’t be polishing something that won’t get released, like so many other times.
I hope my next update will be a Jurassic Idlevoltion update, but it’s just as likely to be “Barkley Saves the Day”, so see you next time.
