indie game dev is just about cheating, always, all the time, whenever it saves you a headache. just constantly doing the most illegal stuff. wacko art styles, hacky one-off scripts, doors that are also tables that are also clouds... games combine 15+ creative disciplines into a single medium and you do not have enough lifespan to do things with propriety
ok ok ok, i thought of a good example of this i ran into recently!!
There's a certain boss fight in Bossgame that has a lot of story beats within the fight, like big plot points are happening, it's a climax of the story, everything is very important. this is pretty much the only fight in the game like this, every other mid-fight conversation is very minimal - characters only speak in one-sentence popups and yell short "battle quotes"
So basically i had NO way of portraying a complex plot mid-battle. I thought about possibly changing scenes to the standard "phone text cutscene" but that code would be a pain and it'd kill the pace. I thought about just doing dozens of the one-sentence popups, but that would take ages and wouldn't have the dramatic feel i was hoping for
SO, what i did: after beating phase 1, i made the boss spawn an empty object, which had a script that would spawn other objects on a timer. Then i had the boss pause its AI for ~55 seconds. the controller object spawns a giant solid black plane to hide the battle, and a bunch of image & text objects play directly over top the battle. the whole cutscene is all just weird one-off objects spawning over each other in sequence.
From there, i just winged the rest. Like, i couldn't really figure out how to convey who was speaking at first, until i realized I could just make massively size up the 48px character heads. i made everything slide around a bit for dynamism and damn, it just... came together. the cutscene is surprisingly complex for me just spawning things over top a battle (i think you can even still press character buttons during it...)
programming a battle cutscene manager would have been a pain to do for a single battle, so i just slapped it all together with gum and it worked!! in fact, i think the limitations inspired me to try some creative workarounds and helped me come up with ideas!! basically, sometimes hacking is great.
