Just smash the frogs, man... (or, a regular software developer's road to madness)

So, this is my first devlog, I haven't written any until now, and I've read a few too many, so I hope you will be entertained...

Are you not? Entertained, I mean...

I started making this game a few months back, and working on it a few hours a month, whenever I had some free time. I work at a university, and also have a software dev part-time, also through university, so I didn't really get much time to work on it. I have played with unity a few years back, when I was a student, and, being swamped with work, only covered the basics, which I totally forgot... 

So I had this idea for a game, that I started, and I started learning unity and all that, and, it was not easy. And I am a "professional" software developer, I also use C#  and .Net more or less daily. But coding is such a small part of a game development, that it looks more like an afterthought. Chasing assets, developing animations, learning about graphic design, so the colours wouldn't kill you when you open the game, stuff like that was the problem.

So, frustrated, I found myself wanting to play a game where I could just smash some sh*t and move on with my life. So I started developing this game. I know it will never be a blockbuster/masterpiece whatever, or even more than once downloaded ( I got 1 download until now, not counting my wife, so thank you, man, I hope you had fun), but, for the first time in my dev career, I had actual fun playing something I made over and over. And that is the problem with making something - often, by the end of it, you are more than sick of it. So, being busy, and working on it a little at a time, I found myself returning to an old friend, rather than doing a chore, say, paying the bills. 

So, the first thing I wanted to make is a hammer that is animated. I researched a bit, and found something I have never seen before, the 12 basic principles of animation. It is something disney animators made a long time ago, but it was new, and very useful to me. Youtube has many tutorials on it, but I found this one really fun: 

So I started working, and being shitty at 3d and animating, I worked slowly being deliberate on using the principles. I don't think the "final" thing turned out so bad, it looks like an animation, which was the desired effect. You can find lots of tutorials and stuff on technicalities of animation and 3d modeling, I can't really go through that again, it was painful the first time...

Next, enemies... I don't really remember how I got to frogs, but, once I got them in my mind, it had to be frogs. So, I tried modeling a frog... and then went to turbosquid and found this model https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/modeled-animations-3d-model-159524 . It has animations and everything, so I am very thankful to the guy for providing it. I tweaked them a bit ( that makes it sound like it was easy), and then I got my frogs and my hammer. I made a simple player script and made the frogs somehow move towards the hammer. Then, the collision, and I had a functioning (notice the fun in there) prototype. 

A few weeks (or maybe it was months) passed, where I would just turn on unity, and smash a few frogs, and then quit and move on to more pressing things. And then, after a while, I started trying to make it feel like a game. I started mushing a basic UI, where you had the button to start, to pause and stuff like that, where I constantly felt I was missing something, since I just winged it and tried to make it using regular software dev rules, and it kinda worked. It was painful but it worked. I still feel I should learn the proper way of doing UI in unity, but, hey, there's time... The thing that was the problem, when I got it to be functional, it was ugly as sh*t... So then I started learning about proper graphic design and principles of that, also user experience, and what is that. I'm not a frontend developer, so all of that was new to me. I found this one just enough so I don't loose my mind https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYfCBK8IplO4E2sXtdKMVpKJZRBEoMvpn

And then, when it looked like it was something someone used a second to make ( being hours and hours into it), I uploaded it to itch. I heard from many celeb gamedevs that you should try to make your game and then publish it. The thing is, when you make something yourself, without a boss pushing you, you don't really feel the need to move forward as much. That's why publishing in early stages is good, because you feel like someone is going to see your shitty graphics, and stupid bugs, so you have a need to correct them. You feel a bit of an urge to please your player. I still don't feel the need to make the game bugless, I have seen users be angry at me for something I made most of my career, so I feel like I can take a critic, but I still want to make a pleasurable experience for the user. Some bugs are intentional (like frog smearing, and hammer spamming), I find enormous joy in them, because they are fun consequences of my f*ckups.

I feel like people are gonna think I spent more time writing this than making the game, but I had to take it off my chest... If anyone found it entertaining I have a few more thoughts, and a few updates in the works...

via MEME

Thanks for reading, have a good day.