So What?
This is the forth Weekly post after a two week gap. The two week gap was due to focusing on a vacation with my partner. In this weekly update, I will focus on exploring the concept of writing posts that have more ‘purpose/use’ to a target audience as well as some general updates on the progression of Rocket Game and some side projects.
I almost didn’t make this post because I have been absolutely addicted to Starfield, which just came out, for the past three days. I am weaning off on it though and setting aside time to focus on my work again. It is a janky game that reminds me a lot of Daggerfall but despite its flaws I really enjoy the gameplay loop of doing bounty jobs and spaceship combat to get credits and skill points to upgrade my ship.
I have been thinking about ‘Users Dont Care About You’ and how it should influence what I post. The question of ‘So What?’ being asked more. I felt my content has been relatively self-centered and as such nobody really ‘cares’ about what I post. I should still try and practice the skill of catering to an audience early so that I can grow it and write content and make products that people care about.
Weekly Posts
This blog was originally created as a way to showcase my interests and discipline to potential employers but I want to focus more on asking that ‘So What?’ Question regardless. For the Weekly Posts, I want to focus more on just the development of Rocket Game because it does serve a purpose to a reader.
The progression notes for the game can be interesting or useful to other game developers. It showcases the problems I had to overcome as a more individual developer from the start to finish
- It Can also act as a way to inform a user who might be considering buying the game
- Useful material for a grand retrospective at the end whether the game succeeds in its goal at qualifying for IGF or fails at it. This is useful for other developers while also building up my credibility
- Therefore the ‘So What?’ here is that “The progress of this game is a useful archive for other developers to get a feel for the unexpected challenges of a game of this scope as well as a realistic expectation of the pace of progress. It also gives potential players of the game a sense of what went into making it and whether it is worth their time as such.”
Other Posts
For other posts… might spend more time to turn them into tutorials. Example I can make the Weekly Post on Conway’s into a tutorial on how to make Conway using SDL2 or Pygame. It showcases my skills but recontextualizes my progress into something that answers ‘So What?’
I am not super confident in my ability to teach and write tutorials but this can be used to my advantage. It also allows simpler projects to still be useful since I can turn my clones of simple projects like Snake or Conway or Space Invaders into something that can be ‘useful’ to a different target audience of students or new programmers.
Tutorial content can invoke Cunningham’s Law to increase engagement and give me valuable feedback to learn from my projects. If I make mistakes or imperfections in the context of writing a tutorial, people would be more eager to correct those mistakes (because there is an incentive to prevent the spread of misinformation and it also gives the user a chance to feel good about themselves).
This allows me to learn too and is far more productive than simply an update post (since people don’t give feedback on ‘Work in Progress’)
The ‘So What?’ is hence ‘This is yet another tutorial that can be used to cross reference other sources for this kind of project, so that the different perspective can help solidify the learning of the concepts in that project. An example of this is exposing a new programmer to how I might do a Snake Clone in Pygame and how that might be different or similar from say Coding Train doing it in p5 processing.”
I also should just write more anyways and get milage out. I am not experienced enough writing these blog posts to focus too much on quality over quantity and as more of a beginner I need to focus more on milage and avoid perfectionism in writing.
Rocket Game Progress
- Got feedback from playtesting with family. Response is good which encourages further development and got useful suggestions such as Charging Shot or more ways to deal more damage.
- Currently player impact feels weaker. There are two solutions I can think of this that compliment each other - Charge Shot similar to Super Metroid or Megaman X that allows the mindgame of charging up a blaster - Tennis-Like projectile merging mechanic
- The challenges for the project merging
- Need to measure which bullet was fired last so it gets the ‘consumption’
- Also encounter how to test mechanics involving two player interaction. The importance of a potential training mode that can be helpful to the player and bot support.
- Going to be doing more in-person playtesting at my university. I managed to arrange appointments to meet my past lecturers to play the game. They tend to be pretty critical during GAM projects so this is a valuable resource
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