What I Learned From 6 Months of Game Dev

The first version of the demo has been submitted. As we wait impatiently for Steamworks to review it, I thought it would be a good time to share some of the things I’ve learned since I started working on this game.

Art

Out of all the aspects of game dev, I think art is the one that takes the longest. I don’t really know how to compare the rate of making art with, say, writing code but it certainly feels like art has the least payoff for the amount of time I put into it. Making art is not something I’ve learned on the fly these past few months, and still I find myself spending unnecessary amounts of time on it. Drawing fast is something you only learn once you gain a lot of experience, I guess. Take note! If you are drawing something you don’t usually draw, it’s probably going to take way longer than you think.

Planning Out the Structure of Your Art

Making a background for a game is a lot different from making a simple 2d drawing. Look at this example:

When the player is walking on the ground in this scene, both sections A and B are in the background.

When on the steps, section A becomes the foreground so the player can enter the house.

I did not have enough foresight to think of this when drawing the background, so I had to go back and manually separate the sections into two different layers. Planning is important.

Writing

Telling a story is really hard! You have to make it consistent, relate it to a central theme, avoid cliché, flesh out your characters, add subtext, all while using good language!?

For these reasons, writing is very demoralising for me, but here is the one thing that has helped me get any of it done: Just get it out. Even if it sounds like a chimpanzee wrote it, it’s still better than not writing anything at all. Then after you’ve written your garbage story, you can iterate on it, write ten thousand drafts, and end up with something that sounds like it was written by a human! This method guarantees neither good writing nor a good mental state, but at least you can say you wrote something, huh?

ChatGPT

So ChatGPT is not…great…for writing things.

What I’ve found it is useful for is generating a ton of ideas, like a list of items that could exist in a bedroom, and sometimes it’s good for finding other ways to say things when a thesaurus won’t cut it.

I haven’t used it to code, though. I don’t see it being that helpful, because I think writing my own code helps me understand it better. But I’ve heard of people using it as a faster search engine for debugging, so maybe in the future I’ll see if it helps with that.

Version Control

Just a warning: if you are not interested in software development, you will likely find this section quite boring.

Until a good four months into developing this game, I did not do any version control at all. I had one Unity project folder stored on iCloud that I worked on directly, and a few (too few) backup folders on my desktop. It wasn’t that I didn’t know there was a better way to do things; I was just too lazy to change the way I did. So I lived every day in a terror of my own making.

And then, I discovered the wonders of Github. You mean you can keep a record of all the changes you’ve ever made to your project? You mean you can retrieve the changes you made a week ago and undo them?? You mean you can create another branch just to muck around without it affecting your main branch??? FOR FREE?????

On a slightly related note, I also learned how to number your versions. Here’s an image from Wikipedia:

So the demo I just submitted is v0.1.0. And every time Minecraft releases a big update, it increments that second number by one, like 1.20. Each time it releases a bunch of bug fixes, it increments the third number, like 1.20.1, which is the latest version!

And That’s Only Part of It

But I have to end the post here.

Thanks for reading! Maybe I’ll do this again in another six months.

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