8/24/23

 Time Worked: 1 hour, 45 mins

Made progress today. just gotta keep moving along. I've been readying Tynan Sylvester's book (Designing Games), and it has been super informative. The thing is, I am a professional programmer - so actually making things isn't really that hard. The hard part for me is having any fucking clue what to make. 

Well that's kind of overboard; I have ideas. It's just I have not been educated in Game Design. And neither have I really been educated in entrepreneurship. So there's a lot I have to learn in those areas. And other areas of course.

Anyway it has been super informative but it has been stressing me out - I'm second guessing every decision I make because I'm learning so much new stuff.

I think I just have to stick it out - keep feeling it out and just going with the flow on this to make it the best it can be until October since that's the original 3 month check-in. At that point, if I wanna completely pivot I can. Still this work is extremely useful and meaningful even if it gets tossed. I mean I'll share my work as a portfolio piece regardless.

And I'm not really saying I'll give up on this project. I'm just saying now is not the time for pausing and thinking - now is the time for doing as much as I can and working hard on producing, just being at the thought level that I am at. I can't read my way into being a good designer; I have to just make stuff. So that's what I'll do for now.

Anyway I've been spending a lot of time on the AI. It's been very neat and cool and I feel rather impressed with myself since I've never done something like this - but there is a lot to do. So sometimes that makes me wonder if I should even be focusing on AI - maybe not. But I think I'm just gonna let this play out, and we'll see. At the very least, I'll have some decent experience programming AI in my own games. Knowledge I can draw on when I inevitably eventually need it.

Something really important I am learning about from the book is about certainty and uncertainty. And the fact is right now I'm very new still - second (actual) game here (beyond game jams). So I'm not going to be very good at estimating things as there's so much I am new to. So I have to take things one step at a time - I shouldn't even be writing design docs beyond like 1-pagers etc. I just need to accept that I'm going to have to be flexible and just keep chugging along.