atomic monster

So I got a little side tracked the last few days and missed my original date for releasing my two week game.  The time was not spent on the game but with general life and family stuff so I'm not going to worry too much about it.  So without further ado I posted the game I have been working for my two week game project to itch.io you can see the link below.  I will do another post when I have more time as kind of a short postmortem about the experience because I found it really interesting.

So my recent exploration of tackling my personal game projects in a different way has been paying off massive ways.  I have been far more productive and creative.  With that comes excitement for the project and even more excitement to show people the game because it is a constant state of completion.  I was digging around the internet more and watching programming talks and reading papers on software creation when I came across one that I had heard about but never read.  It is a paper called "No Silver Bullet" by Fred Brooks .  It is a wonder paper and I was super excited when I came across this section towards the end because it turns out it is exactly the approach I have been taking and I have been experiencing the same results from a personal and production level. Incremental development --grow, don't build, software. I still remember the jolt I felt in 1958 when I first heard a friend talk about building a program, as opposed to writing one. In a flash he br

Recently I posted about how I created a finished game loop right away for my side game project.  I have continued to work in the same way I talked about then and have had time to reflect on why this is working for me.  Simply put I solved my biggest problem first.  Everyone and every game has different problems, but sitting down and being honest with myself at the very start allowed me to address this right away. As progress moves forward I still maintain this reflective thought process.  I look at what is actually stopping or slowing down my progress and then I solve that problem, in the most simple way as I can.  That means I solve only that problem and not problems that I think will arise down the road.  These are also tending to be my workflow problems so completely unique to my current situation.  For example when I completed the finished game loop I had a few different game objects like triggers to enter new rooms, player spawners and dart traps.  When I made these objects t

Okay so recently I decided to work on my game development and design skills.  I have a horde of unfinished projects on my hard drive.  I have learned so much from working on each and everyone of them, except how to get better at finishing the game.  I want to fix this so I decided to take a different approach than anything I had ever done before.  I decided to start by making a finished game. Let me explain what I mean.  On my current project I did something completely different than before.  I made the most simple version of the finished game as quickly as I could.  Not a prototype but an actual finished game...not a good game but a finished from start to end game.  You start at the main menu, enter the game, reach a goal get the win screen or die and get the game over screen.  It's simple but the from the point of view from the player it is a completable game.  All in all it took my 4 hours and gave me something I can look at and make decisions on.  Its kind of like when an