A few months ago, people in my timeline suddenly started posting about game dev stuff at the same time. Miguel de Icaza was working on his Xogot app. Matt Massicotte was building an FPS, then some voxel thing. Matt Sephton was announcing his 90th game. So I got curious and set out to learn Godot and make my own game. Maybe I have a knack for making games, who knows.
I installed Godot and learned GDScript, which feels like a weird flavor of Python with a lot of SceneKit-like stuff built in. I created my first project, which is basically a Nethack-ish roguelike but with quality-of-life changes from Diablo 2 (e.g. a starting town, waypoints, cheap scrolls of town portal and identify). I found the Dawnlike tileset, which was nice because they already have .import files. I called the game DiabloHack. Wow such creativity.
I started by generating a map, then a slightly nicer map. Then my character, then making the character move. Then monsters and combat (just move into the monster to attack it). Then items, inventory, death drops. Then the starting town (so I had to re-render the map when you entered or exited the town), vendors, stash. Then a skill tree, experience, leveling.
I thought, okay, I have the skeleton of a playable game. I just need more content and polish. Then I went to Steam to see what other people were making. All of them had professional marketing videos. Graphics that I could never draw. Fancy particle effects. Even cutscenes. And those games were made by 1 person too.
Then I looked at my game with 1 terrain type and 1 monster type. Non-animated sprites. Crappy UI, crappy feel. I deleted the project. Like I rm -rf’d that thing. It felt like such a huge waste of time.
A few weeks later I got the itch to build it again. I thought I could do it better this time since I already knew GDScript. So I tried to make improvements. I got a map generator that no longer produced inaccessible squares. And characters now moved smoothly between tiles instead of snapping.
For some reason the smooth movement gave me motion sickness. This was the first time a 2D game had made me motion sick. I didn’t know what went wrong. The new project didn’t play like the first one. And I couldn’t reproduce the game that had kept me going.