All done, I think

Spears Dracona on 2025/03/29 02:52 of Meep!

I've got my game to a point that I'm pretty happy with and uploaded what will probably be the final version.

I've really only participated in the past in an art role so programming a whole game myself was new to me. My history in game development is a lot of unfinished projects that only get as far as making art or starting and never finishing a tutorial to try and learn a game engine. This is the first time I have ever seen a whole game through from beginning to end. It's simple, but it's something significant for me.

When I say I went in blind, I'm not kidding. I got online Saturday night and remembered, "Oh yeah, there's a PyWeek going on at the end of this month," got on the website, and saw that it was starting in seven minutes. I got it in my head that I was going to participate, registered an entry, voted on the themes, and spent the rest of the remaining minutes Googling what the best libraries for making 2D games in Python were. I decided to roll with Arcade, for no other reason than arcades are cool.

Most of my decisions in creating this game were just spur-of-the-moment thoughts that I acted on with no real rhyme or reason.

I went with the first "downstream" idea that popped into my head, a game about a rubber ducky floating down a stream. Seemed simple enough.

Now when I say I'm not much of a programmer, I mean that I am definitely not a programmer by trade and I don't have a degree in it. I took a Python class in 2012. I get the urge to dabble in game development periodically but it's not something I've stuck with consistently. And the past couple of years of my life have been pure insanity. What skills I do have are extremely rusty.

I spent the first couple of days Googling "How to ___ in Python Arcade" for just about everything. On Sunday, I felt like I was in over my head just getting the basics down. I was seriously concerned I might not be able to finish even a very simple prototype this week. On Monday I finally got to a point where I was coding things without looking everything up. Then on Tuesday, I made a ton of progress and actually got to a point where the main features of the game were finished. I started adding little things that I thought would make it feel more fun or more polished, like simple animations for the sprites, keeping track of the player's high score, a nicer title screen and game over screen, little effects when you kill enemies, more things that show up in the background, stuff like that. I threw together some simple sound effects in Jsfxr (https://sfxr.me/) and found some cute music that was licensed under a Creative Commons license since I know music is outside of the scope of what I can learn to do myself in a week on top of everything else.

I got it to a point that I think it feels like a real game and I kind of love it. I've spent a lot of time just playing it for fun. I don't know if I'm just giddy because I made it myself or if it's actually really fun, but I guess I'll find out when other people play it.

I learned a lot over the course of this week, and a lot of things came back to me. There are a lot of things I could have done better. A lot of things that probably should have been separate classes or functions. I definitely want to work on making my code more modular in the future and not just throw everything in one insane mega file like I did this time.

But hey, I made a game. I made a whole game by myself. And that's something I'm proud of. I feel like I could tackle something slightly bigger and challenge myself a little bit more, and I'm kind of excited about doing it.

This was a lot of fun and I can't wait to see everyone else's games.