Defining oneself in a world of conflict; The challenges in independent game design

Conflict is a part of everything. it’s internal in ourselves, a balance of a hundred points which you don’t even think about because they have been integrated into your mind. There are pros and cons to every action. It makes the world a complicated place to live, it makes it hard for us to know ourselves. It makes each decision all the more valuable for it’s propensity to compel repeated action (law of consistency) (Influence: Robert Cialdini PH.D.Phyc)

I’ve been struggling with the need to define myself before I start something. Feeling the need to understand my niche before I start delving into things deeply. Feeling like everything I do needs to fulfill some greater purpose. Recently this burden has been somewhat lifted as I realized creativity is a mix of deep understanding usually brought by experience and diversity brought by music, communication/language, history and life experiences.

Sadly, I haven’t been invested in TLZ essentially since covid started. It had been a passion project of mine (as part of Paralore Studios) . We wanted to make something that would be interesting and fun and it is. I know eventually it will draw some people, and I may jump onto it again if I receive a few dimes to speed the development along. Part of the problem is that we’ve been trucking along with it for about 2 years, and since we haven’t yet made any money off of it, it’s hard to want to continue the development. I’ll of course come back to fleshing out all the dirty little details if it gets any demand in the market. Our problem is still, and has always been appreciating our value. These are a bunch of creative individuals I work with in Paralore, and it’s so fun to watch the minds at work when we have our weekly brainstorm. Some of the members of our group are socially aware and active, some are focused on business aspects, we are all here for own reasons and to get experience. We’ve been to many shows/expos to demo the game and get feedback. People seem to like it, but getting things to market is largely a battle of self esteem. When is the game “good enough” to ask for money. How much content. How do we release. All many questions which probably seem simple to people with experience in the field. largely because of covid, the routine is so messed up that I often forget that there was even a meeting to go to… I’ve hardly opened my game dev computer. There are many reasons for this I’d like to write about.

Originally, I got into game development because I wanted to be able to quickly create worlds of wonder. Since I was a kid there were tools to do this. From the hammer editor on pc to RPG maker on playstation. These tools were amazing for several reasons. They were powerful in their ability to terraform, import art and characters to create quality game content in a fast and intuitive manner. Rpg maker is really a full tool for game development, honestly. It handles the math of combat, the combat animation setup rpgs where you didn’t have to worry about setting up a class just to be able to better inspect how each object collides. I want to rely on the engine to quickly/easily manage that stuff so I don’t have to think about it…

https://cdn.gamer-network.net/2018/metabomb/csgohowtosurf.jpg
player shown “surfing” on a map where there is no ground to land on. You use momentum to slide, or surf across hundreds of meters of roof in a few moments.

That’s why hammer was so beautiful. It was powerful when it needed to be, you could quickly setup zones in 3d space which had triggers which could activate animations, or basically do anything… change gravity constant, change custom vars; just play any number of the Counter Strike or Half Life Deathmatch player mods from zombie maps to surf maps, and many other specialized gametypes and mods, notably Gary’s mod and you will see how creative so many people can be. Surf maps exploit a gravitational glitch, when strafing on steep surfaces. It’s just cool the sorts of fun accidental creative things which develop out of an ease of playing with editors

Similarly I want to challenge people, and make them think, and bring them a story that will stay with them. As a DM for PFRP DnD, Dungeon World and others I continually create worlds, and story arcs, and run thru them over and over before the party plays, and I know there are tools which will better help me reach my dreams of quickly conveying this interesting content without fussing over every grain of sand of the game creation. Instead of keeping our target in mind we became derailed by the need to finish this game TLZ, in order to proove to ourselves that we were worthy to do the game we wanted to do. Some parts were fun, but the constant regressions because of issues with unity colab/prefabs, people not understanding the structure, cause there was no clear way to document why structure was a certain way within the editor… I should have made a secondary structural documentation explaining base objects and why they need to be oriented in certain ways… but where can I link that too from within the editor so the user would know/see it?? anyway… all of this has led to us making an intentionally grungy game, and I feel like I’m going thru this 2d phase where we’re creating a modern day bogerman instead of creating something beautiful and compelling … I don’t want to trash on TLZ, the story has some really good interesting depths, not to mention the perspective of the poor infected zombies. The gameplay is fun and there are good levels and boss fights. But there isn’t currently anyone for Reggie to interact with. The story is told thru the game and not thru explicit text or conversations. There isn’t anyone for Reggie to talk to (in the early game) so we have him producing thought bubbles when we want to prompt the players.

Power of programing (and it’s limitations)

Scripting is fun and powerful, and if you can program, you will have a Swiss army knife at your disposal. But designing the game and the interaction. Using some rough tools which are already there instead of creating everything from scratch…. You ever try to make a wooden statue out of a Swiss army knife? try to make a puzzle by carving a log using one? It can be done, but it takes great care, and great time… Having the right tools for the job is always the most critical aspect of any process… Sometimes, it’s better to take the raw materials, but most times, it’s better if the stuff is processed to some extent already, and we could tweak the stuff under the hood but generally just have our eyes on using options built into the framework…
This is the divide to SDK or to spin your own?
There is such an eliteist notion to game development, but I’ve seen some things that make me question the direction of my own path. Options, open source collab. There is so much great stuff out there… imagine what we could do if we worked together…… I’ve been focusing on my strengths of coding, and only taking tasks related to that, Whenever there was conflict, I just stepped back and did what I thought was fun. That’s the whole reason we have all these interesting features like burning crates and elemental colas…. but I had to design stuff that basically comes out of the box when you are using some kind of source/HDK framework. Having to constantly worry about layers, and angle of spawning projectile, fixing a hundred little bugs and figuring out how to reimplement save points in this particular language. Having to redesign the road several times, and rescale things which caused levels across the game to be significantly altered… That shit isn’t fun to me, and I don’t want to have to think about it as a content creator…. Don’t get me wrong, Unity is incredibly powerful, so you can create everything you could ever want… but I can pretty much already do everything I need with Hammer, and I don’t have to consume so much time to get my ideas “onto the page”… With blender to create whatever world object I need, and animate characters, I’ve wanted to be a part of all the aspects of a game, but teamwork is hard. I probably should have fraught more for my goals and design ideals from the start, and pushed my toolchain so i would get what I wanted out of the project. Instead I did what I thought would be best for the team, and let them figure their own path, and I would do all the scripting… Needles to say, I’m not a fan of the artist’s toolchain. Seems unfortunate how complex it is just to render stuff… I always wanted to do 3d design… I felt like I got dragged into 2d design because we felt we weren’t good enough… and weren’t ready to handle a 3d game… then we continued to bite off more than we could chew. We let the simple get away from us, and tried to build something which we could feel proud of instead of just creating something simple and powerful which is fun, To me the level creation and design is the fun part… Now that the design work is slowing down it’s basically complete for TLZ, i want to make more levels… That’s the fun part for me, I don’t like having to butt heads with anyone, on level design because my design is “confusing them” when I’m trying to make some puzzle aspects…. When your time is spent in rejiggering some little animation for 12 hours or solving some bug in a feature that shouldn’t be so hard it can be defeating and you forget about the joy of the content creating… I need to forge my own path. I need to create what I want. The problem is that working with people towards a common goal is a billion times more efficient than doing everything yourself. World is a hard and complicated place to live in. It can be hard to understand all the requirements as well as filling our wants and needs, it can be hard to find things that drive us, but when you find that thing… Just keep doing it and don’t stop… I would say this particularly applies to the toolchain that you use… The more you stick with powerful and efficient tools , the better your life will be. Be persistent about learning but beware that persistence can be a sort of a trap too… I spent a couple years working part time on this game, and it’s a fun game, but we went thru so many changes and so much content, several ideas got lost which were good. Several little things still need polish, but none of us could spend the time enough to actually knock it out because it could take a day or 2 of effort to fix compounded by the problem that there are several dozen of these, not to mention minor bugs, or weird spots where the floor is a few px too thin, or misaligned which somehow, which people will inevitably discover may not be obvious during initial testing.

Bottom line is that without releasing any product we were undermotivated and understaffed. Hard to hold things together without constant input from various skill sets. Our inability to quickly productize eventually led to our dissolution.