Not quite making games yet, but I’ve got more on my mind. I’m still conflicted, but I think I’m finding my way into the design mindsets that will be most productive for me. A couple more ideas:
THE VAMPIRE SURVIVORS QUANTITY CONUNDRUM
So, one of the big goals I have with whatever I make next is that, whatever it ends up being, I want it to be bigger. More quantity of game. I could make 10-30 minute long game experiences for the rest of my life. Short games are not bad, and I love both making and playing them. I am generally one of those folks in agreement with all the memes about shorter games made by fewer people, and paying more money for them.
I’d like to challenge myself to get over the hour threshold. If not something that can be completed in no less than an hour, then something that would stay engaging or be hooky enough to encourage play for an hour.
But I’ve got an axe to grind with hooky games right now. Vampire Survivors is one of the most influential games of the past couple years. It is extremely hooky and engaging. That’s about where my praise for it ends, as the swingy randomness and slot-machine gratification begging me to play more hits me the wrong way. I can recognize it as a good game in that its approach works exceptionally well. I admit that I do want to grind money to get those incremental improvements, and the action of the game is just satisfying enough to keep me coming back.
Well, I checked my Steam activity to show I’ve only played 2.6 hours. That it did not take any more of my time might be a good thing. I feel like there are certain games out there, regardless of whether they’re good or bad, that are agnostic to the value of the player’s time. There’s no correlation between the quality of a game and how it may treat a player’s time, in my experience. There are many modern trends in games that lean towards valuing player time less, but for my money it’s roguelites and idle games that most exhibit keenly tuned progressions that keep the game just satisfying enough and offer a notion of progress in their mires. I’m starting to develop a gag-reflex for items that “increase X statistic by Y tenths of a percentage point,” or what have you.
One of these days, I will probably indulge this incremental and failure-filled design approach to see how it works. I’m sure it’s immensely challenging to pull it off as well as Loop Hero, Vampire Survivors, or any of their imitators, and it would be a great learning opportunity. Going back to meaningful game design: Could I make a game in this mold that says something? Does Vampire Survivors say something meaningful? Maybe it does, and I encourage anyone to argue for it. I didn’t find meaning in it, and unless I wanted to make a morose existential-crisis-simulation, I don’t think I would want to make a game like it.
AFRAID OF MY OWN SHADOW, CAST IN PIXELS
Look, I love Game Maker and I love pixel art. If I didn’t find Game Maker and enjoy animating pixel art, I wouldn’t be here. I’m going to type aloud something every other pixel artist has already thought: 3D art feels like a bar of quality, or a threshold for legitimacy, in the indie/solo dev space. I don't want to reinforce this notion as I don't feel it is actually true, but it's something I feel strongly in my Twitter-addled brain soup.
Two takeaways on the subject of moving from 2D to 3D: I am confident that I can meet my goals as a designer working exclusively in 2D. I am not confident I can find success in making games, either alone or as part of a team, if I don’t transition into a game-making pipeline that supports 3D art.
It’s so daunting! It is something I want to do for its own sake, not just for making a game that is more marketable or more attractive. With my drawing and pixel art skills as bad as they are, I know it would take years before I could ever make attractive 3D art.
It’s really only a compromise as a designer, as I don’t think I know math or geometry well enough to make a 3D game that, again, says something in its abstraction of space. I’m looking at years of practice, basically starting anew as a maker of games, to make games that could fit their ideas on 2D planes with small sprites.
I want to be optimistic about it and approach the challenge head-on. This is where my burnout is definitely holding me hostage. I don’t want to give up on the foundation I’ve built just because I appreciate 3D game aesthetics. I also don’t want to make a fundamental shift into something new under the auspices of “success” or social acceptance, which are both exceedingly rare regardless of what tools are in use.
Should I wait until I have a meaningful design idea to try sketching it out in Unreal with placeholder graphics? Should I learn the tools and let the learning process lead me into new design ideas? I don’t know, and this internal debacle has me running in place, watching bits and pieces of tutorials and reading documentation for tools I’ve never opened.
