Idea
With Fantastic Arcade happening most of the week, it was shaping up to be a busy one – which meant that I knew my game would have to be small this week. With all of the negativity surrounding the games industry recently, a flippant conversation with Fernando Ramallo led to me wanting to make a game where the only goal is to hug everyone. I took this in a Katamari direction and ultimately decided that this week’s game would be about hugging people and growing larger, until you were large enough to hug the whole world.
What went right
I made a game about hugging everyone until you hugged the whole world. It’s a fairly pleasant game and I’m happy to have made something that, at its core, is about something positive. Hugs are wonderful, and everyone could use more hugs.
I’ve been trying to make my own art more and more. When I’m laying around and relaxing, I attempt to now spend that time doodling on my iPad. As someone who has always had a very “technical” mind, art has never really been my strong suit. I would draw when I was younger, but it was always copies of already existing pictures. Creating an artistic vision out of my own head always seemed out of my reach. This was one of the first weeks where I really tried to integrate my own artwork into a game. It’s not wonderful, but I had a vision and made it happen.
What went wrong
My first week after my huge revelation of how great working on a game ahead of time is, and I procrastinated again. Fantastic Arcade is such a wonderful event and there were so many great people to catch up with, that I had a hard time finding the time to work on my game. It was a refreshing event, but I had a really hard time managing my time properly.
I also have a problem where, every now and again, events will cause a sneaky sadness in me. I talked about it a little bit here, but while I find that attending events like this is helpful in 99% of the ways, I will sometimes feel completely demoralized by all of the amazing things that my peers are creating. I convince myself that I’m not good enough to ever make “something like that” and fall down this endless hole of self doubt. This happened with quite the force this week, and made working on a happy game about hugging all the harder. I’m out of my self-doubt hole for now, but that doesn’t change that it did happen this week.
This doesn’t excuse away my procrastinating, but it is why it happened.
What I learned
I didn’t learn too much in the sense of game development this week, but what I did learn is a lot of the reasons behind why I go down my self-doubt spiral of sadness. I’m hoping that in the future, I can recognize it a lot sooner and nip it in the bud before I really fall down the hole.