Boxes Postmortem

What went wrong?

Week three, game three. I’m starting with what went wrong this week, because this week was a mess. After last week’s success planning out a game, I went into this week with the same mind set, but life happens. Unfortunately my youngest daughter got sick and I spent a lot of the week taking care of her and not sleeping. On Monday, I tried planning some stuff out on paper, but I just couldn’t get the ideas flowing. I knew I wanted to limit myself by using only a few colors, keeping music, sound and gameplay all minimal and possibly even making colors the main gameplay mechanic. I was not inspired at any point by the colors as a game mechanic idea, and while I’m sure it can be done, using 4 colors or less made it difficult. At first, I envisioned a square moving through the level, dodging other moving squares, while having to change its color somehow in order to pass through various colored walls. I think I recall having a semi working version of this but somehow it morphed into a square riding colored lines as they scrolled by, almost like guitar hero, and adding up points based on changing the colors of the square to match the color of the line. With limited colors, the square was basically invisible on the line, something easy to solve, but interruptions and lack of sleep just throw you off your game(heh). No idea why I didn’t stick with first iteration. Apparently sleep is important.

For a reason I can’t remember anymore, this second idea shifted to platforming on top of the colored lines, avoiding walls as everything scrolled by, and being able to pass through colored lines as long as you matched the color. Again, being interrupted by a sick kid asking for carrots or cheese sticks every few minutes really messes with your train of thought. I wrote down very little in the notebook and had no real overall plan or direction, so it was no shock that the game changed again as I was writing some code for double jumping. With a few hours of sleep the night before and trying to remember where I was in the game design process, I found myself on Wednesday morning staring at a box on the screen that could only move left and right. I guess at some point I change the vertical movement to horizontal? I dropped my much loved pink and blue color scheme and went a more muted route. I added some blocks and just let gravity do it’s thing.

What went right?

Once I recognized that the game design had no direction and that all of my decisions were made while sleep deprived, I focused on not changing anything about the game and just complete what I had on screen. I added a little challenge to an otherwise dull block dodger, by increasing drop rate over time, and having each block explode into a few smaller blocks that would shoot back at you. It’s not great. It’s not even interesting, but I finished it. I learned that even with a lack of sleep, if I would have just forced myself to work longer in the notebook instead of feeling like I needed to have something built, I could have avoided a lot of this. I was concerned that I would run out of time and rushed into making something, which turned into making about four “half-things”. As a possible note, I remember driving to pick up food for the family one night, and through the sleep deprivation, I had an idea to change the game into a gameboy palleted(all greens) platforming game that was in no way a ripoff of TMNT: Fall of the Foot Clan. Fortunately I decided what a fool I was for this idea, and how pivoting yet again would be a massive waste of time. I decided to save this for week four.