The Joy of Developing a Game: Follow the Fun.
Continuing the theme of my most recent hyperfixation of game dev, today I want to quickly talk about what I find so much fun about making a game.
First, the real crack about game dev, and coding in general, is the loop of infinite and fairly novel problem solving. It's a lot of fun figuring out the logic of a hard coding problem. There's magic in turning abstract ideas into code that turns pixels into movable characters and monsters.
When you're just starting out, that's really all the fun you can have. And if you don't find that fun, I'd suggest maybe looking for a different hobby.
But, once, like in the games we play, you are through the grind, a deeper level of fun reveals itself. The magic moment that I recently experienced was when I found testing my simple prototype game as fun in-and-of itself.
My previous post I talked briefly about the path finding algorithm I was working on. When I wrote that, I had finished the algorithm, but hadn't implemented it. Once I did, I now have monsters that attack me instead of just randomly stumbling around. As a quirk (bug maybe) in how I've programmed it all, they approach in a fairly stilted way. I've also not implemented the items required to boost stats and make certain monsters actually killable. This led to me playing a game of trying to dance around and avoid the monsters and in that I slipped out of the mode of testing my code to make sure it runs and into the mode of playing a game and actually having fun.
The moment where I was playing my game and thought, "oh shit! This is actually fun!" was pure magic.
That magic moment is now inspiring how I'm moving forward with my game design. I really like the movement/dodging mechanic that I accidentally implemented and will now lean into that mechanic and make sure there are difficult if not impossible monsters that are to be avoided rather than killed.
Going forward I think I'm also going to adopt the motto, 'Follow the fun,' in this and all creative endeavors. Fun's where the magic is.
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