NOTE: Because of an extreme case of holy-crap-I-have-so-much-to-do-and-I’m-so-burnt-out-on-game-a-week-stuff, this post is happening over a month after actually making this game. Thus, this is probably going to be short and not full of too much helpful information (seeing as how I can hardly remember the process of making this specific game). Sorry!
Idea
I’m not sure where the idea for this game came from. I think I was trying to come up with a game that was just an infinite experience with minimal input.
I’ve always liked magnets, so it seemed like a pretty fun mechanic to play around with. I also wanted to play around with an indirect control scheme again (like in week 45), so I decided to combine those two thoughts!
The original idea was that you’d have a charged particle that you could control via two magnets. Just like how normal science works- opposite charges would attract and similar charges would repel. I ultimately settled on hovering a particle between two magnets that you could rotate but clicking on them.
What went right
I remember having a few nice design “ah-ha!” moments this week. Unfortunately, I don’t really remember what they were after a month of sitting on this. I remember realizing that the game would get really stale feeling after a while of just avoiding obstacles. I fixed this by switching charges on a regular interval and swapping the mechanic around so that now you would have to collect items instead. This keeps you on your toes and confuses the player a little bit – which I always enjoy doing.
What went wrong
I waited a month before thinking or writing about this game – so now I’ve basically lost 90% of the things I would have learned from making this game. It’s not that I have that bad of a memory, it’s more that I gave myself exactly 0 time to decompress from this week. While doing something like Game a Week, you will generally immediately start thinking about the next week’s game upon finishing the current week’s. I relied heavily on these postmortems to collect my thoughts, figure out what exactly I learned from the week’s work of game development and solidify that new knowledge in my head. By putting this off for so long and then immediately jumping into a new brain-space after completing the game, I spent no time committing any lessons to memory. I would actually say that this is my most failed week in terms of Game a Week, despite having actually made a game as I gained almost no long term insights from it (which is completely my fault).
What I learned
Holy moly postmortems are important.
Hi,
True thoughts. Being there right now. I would recommend you try and maintain a dev log on a site like tigsource parallel to your game creation efforts. It keeps a record for you and the rest of us minions.;) have a good time