There’s been quite a bit of progress on my game engine since the last time I posted about it. I now have playable cards, building placement, effect automation, ability to manipulate elements on a hex map and a research pile. All in all, it has taken me approximately 35 hours to reach this stage which feels pretty decent for someone who’s never used Godot or built a video-game from scratch before, but I think a lot has to do with my time building card game plugins in OCTGN.
I even created a Godot demo on how to merge hexagons into tilemaps, which is the question I was asking last time 🙂
Unfortunately, while my coding has already caught up to the rudimentary design I had drafted, I feel like I’ve been procrastinating from furthering the existing design by losing myself into the code. I even started making Unit Tests rather than progress the game’s design.
Funnily enough, I initially thought that the game design would be the easy part, and actually making the engine to run it, was going to be overwhelming. However now that my basic code has provided me a platform to create fast iterations on design (which is why I wanted to start with the engine before I has a working prototype), I find that when I’m going back to complete the design game, I find that overwhelming.
I have to make it interesting? And exciting? And variable?” Uuuuugh! Can’t I just code existing mechanics instead? At least then I have a tangible goal and I’ll know when I’ve achieved it.
My stupid internal monologue
I’ve always been much better at expanding what was already there than making something from scratch, and it is a “muscle” I’ve never trained before. It will take me a while before I’m not instinctively afraid of the amount of work I have to do. That’s my main procrastination trigger.
I have to keep reminding myself: I do have experience in game design, did tons playtest organizing, got ~25 years of boardgame experience, and now I know enough of a video game engine to perform game design iterations at a speed others can’t match. This is doable for me, damnit!
And yet, every time I open my design document, my brain tries to run out of my head.
Anyway, here’s a random screenshot.
