I told myself I’d release something playable by the end of the year, and I did it! It’s a barely-even-a-demo for the game I’ve been making for the past few months as I learn GML and pixel art, available for free to play in your browser. (I’d suggest playing on a computer since I don’t know how to optimize for mobile yet, lol).
It’s easy to look at it and think it’s not very much, especially given the work involved in making it — if you do literally everything available in the demo, it amounts to under ten minutes of gameplay, and there isn’t really a story or even an actual game loop in there yet. It’s above all a collection of assets and features I’ve managed to get working to my satisfaction, and that provide scaffolding for narrative and mechanics to come.
Still, I am more proud of this little scrap of a thing than anything I’ve touched in years, and the creative fulfillment it’s brought me has made basically every aspect of my life better over the past season. I wanted to know that I could make something that walked like a game and quacked like a game, and it turns out that I can.
I’ve always been this way with projects, now that I think of it; my first “book” was my undergrad thesis, a 92-page collection of essays that wholecloth did not make it into my actual first book of essays five years later. It wasn’t that the writing or thinking in there was particularly good, but that in writing it I learned how to write it, or, ideally, something like it but better. Same goes for knitting my first sweater; it was a lumpy and unwearable raglan but it was most definitely a sweater, and once I knew the theory of how to construct one, I knew how to make subsequent versions a lot closer to what I’d envisioned all along. It’s a good reminder to myself that the fucking up is the work, which I tend to forget because who wants to be bad at something for even one minute????
Coding, of course, has been a full-on crash course in humility. I am not a natural-born woman in STEM, to put it mildly, and there’s so little room for error that I’ve gone through days of frustration (bordering on despair) while trying to implement or fix the most basic-seeming thing. But, to my continual surprise, programming remains quite possibly the most satisfying and rewarding part of this whole process. It’s a game in and of itself, one that I get to set the pace of. It’s like learning a language and a craft simultaneously, mechanized mundane magic. This week I had to fix a pretty big problem (the inventory system was adding items properly, but deleting incorrect ones) which required what I could think of as nothing so much as frogging, or the knitting term for ripping back stitches, so named for “rip-it, rip-it, rip-it.” Deleting big chunks of code hurt in the same way: the visible discarding of hours of effort, the annoyance that you can’t just isolate the one tiny issue but must instead sacrifice everything that came between the fuckup and your realization of it. It also felt good in the same way, the solid knowledge that you can fix your own mistakes, or at least know where to start looking.
Anyway, I have two resolutions for the coming year: to “finish” this game, whatever that means, and put it out into the world, and to pick my knitting needles back up in earnest. (Also I’m doing Dry January but I reserve the right to stop at any time if it sucks lmao.) Drop me a line if you want to talk about any of this, because I’m really starting to annoy my loved ones with talk of data structures and branching dialogue trees.
Randomly stumbled across this via a RT through a friend. Great work so far! Encouraging to see how much you've done in just a few months. I've picked up GML twice and dropped it when it starts to get really time-intensive to learn anything more than the basics, but I'm sticking with it this time. I also feel like I've played enough games at this point in my life to know what is fun and what isn't, so I should try to see if I can put my thoughts into practice.
Can I ask which tutorial series' you're using? I'm always looking for more thorough explanations on everything as I learn. I'm currently using the Little Town tutorial directly from GameMaker, it's been pretty nice so far.