>>5473
>Do you ever look at 2D girls and wish they were real so they could cuck you?
Just where do you think we are?
>what you've learned over the dev process so far
I've learned that I hate and mistrust computers; those who do this for a living have assured me that this is right and proper.
Seriously though, I'm still coming to grips with what an undertaking even a small game can be. There's a lot to even simple things, in every discipline, and a lot that can go wrong in non-obvious ways. No matter what I'm doing, I've always tried to fish around for leverage - things that might be hidden and hard, but which have outsize impact in that they make everything else easier. In games, this means trying to make something that can... self-assemble? It's almost like building one's very own make-an-X toolkit, in that you have to make choices about how your very general tools end up being applied to make more specific tools. That's been useful, though it can often feel like you're wasting time on extra work, at least until it lets you churn through a half-dozen versions of something that really needed the ability to quickly tweak in order to get right.
There's also a lot of catch-22 to this, in that it's difficult to design something without actually having it in your hands. This knack only seems to come with experience, so the only real way is to stumble your way through whatever you can and keep your eyes open. There are times when you can see everything, and times when you're deep in a valley and just have to trust that you're not hopelessly lost
even though often you are.
What helped me a lot was to make an inert "playground", which was an environment made of shitty placeholders that formed things I wanted to include. I wanted the player to be able to uncover and crawl through small spaces, so the playground has a little tunnel. I wanted inclines, so the playground has inclines. I wanted moving scenery, so the playground has bridges. I wanted ladders and one-way jump-down points, so the playground has those. You get the point.
The great thing about the playground was that it became a physical (well, virtual) to-do list. Once something was working and I had an idea for how it could go just a little bit further, all I needed to do was edit the playground a little so that I couldn't do what I wanted to do without going that little bit further. Also, having everything in one place meant that I ended up trying to make systems that would address as many things at once as possible, instead of trapping myself in little cul-de-sacs that only did the one thing I was trying to do at that point.
Also, making said placeholder assets intentionally shitty or garish can be a good thing because then you can't get used to seeing them. However, you do have to make sure you get those placeholders communicating the concept you want - a placeholder for a glowing tree should still be tree-shaped and glow, or do you want to find out at the last minute that light-emitting textures don't work the way you thought they did? A placeholder for an elevator mechanism should still move the way you want it to, or do you want to find out that moving it around causes something else to go horribly wrong?
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