Cutting Everything!

So yesterday I had a massive amount of stress thinking about all this. You know, typical crushing inescapable self-doubt. The, "what the hell am I thinking, I am just an average dude, I can't do something like this" kind of stuff. And yeah, I am an average dude. But I'm doing it anyway.

So I didn't get barely any work done yesterday as a result. Which is fine. Sometimes you gotta just know when to stop and recover. Today I am feeling much better. I've said several times on this blog that I am aware that it's important to scope as small as possible, and to make as many games as possible, because you never know what is going to fail or succeed. And more games = more reps, which means faster improvement. 

It's just insanely hard to actually do that. I've spent nearly a whole year on this game and... I've realized I need to cut and cut and cut and cut. I wish I had done so earlier. But that's just the way of things. I am going to finish and release the game ASAP, planning for this month. I have decided I actually am not going to have that map feature I worked on the other day, because I think it's just one more level of complexity. I am also not going to have any sort of metagame. It's just going to be arcade-style. I also am going to completely remove RTS controls. It's just gonna be a top-down shooter with a squad that follows you. As lame as it can sound, I am really just going to make this a cooler EndSoldier.

Here's the mechanics list I'm at now:

• Top-Down Shooter (in there)
• Squad that follows you (in progress)
• Switching between characters via Tab (easy)
• Weapons and armor that can be equipped to characters, and are found in level randomly (easy)
• Simple stats like reaction time (rotation speed), reload speed, HP, etc. which improve with lvl up
• Several enemy types
• At least one map

And yeah that's basically it. Super easy. At least I think. I don't see anything here that is that crazy, especially considering I basically took the prototype I made in a few days (Deadly Operations Group) and just applied those mechanics to this. They were very easy to do. The only thing I am concerned about really is just having to deal with the massive, absolutely massive amount of dead code in this project.

Also it's just crazy to me that I wasted so much time during development. But.. I don't know. Maybe it was just a learning experience. Now I know what the game should be. And now I am very, very determined not to waste time in the future. I think I will be better at cutting things down because I know how brutal the process can be.

Two other nice things to note, I posted a couple GIFs on Twitter (X whatever) in an attempt to begin marketing. Finally. So, what I may do is spend the first hour of any work session just focusing on interacting with people by marketing or talking with other devs. I also shared a GIF on Reddit asking other devs for their opinion on the art style, and they were pretty much all supportive of it. So, while I already know it's not going to impress anyone, it may come off charming like I want it to. Also somebody even said it reminded them of Madness, which is a massive inspiration for it so that's a big win as far as I'm concerned.

]