Published on

Expectations Management

est. 4 min read

Ok, now for some expectations for those of you who have decided to continue enduring my lunacy:

  • My motivation is scarce, so prepare your heart
  • Frequency will probably vary, so check back when you feel like it
  • Plan is for a tutorial-sized project, so put your wallet away
  • There will be
    • a game loop and a couple levels, but nothing too fancy
    • a couple enemies
    • some pickups
    • a couple of hazards
    • music, sounds, a parallax background

As always, you can check out the project page if you want to give the current version a try.

So, I think it'll be good to know what to expect regarding the process and the content.

Process

As with the other project (and as I've already demonstrated), this one is subject to my historically scarce (and at best, scattered) motivation. So, if these articles suddenly stop, that probably means I've moved on, burnt out, or rage quit. I'll try to post an article for closure, but I'm not promising anything. Also, the frequency of articles will likely vary, since there may or may not be anything to write about at any given time. Hopefully I'll be clear about what I'm currently doing.

For example, if I'm rage-googling a problem, there probably won't be any articles while I deal with solving said problem. However, if I manage to succeed, there should be an article about it (I mean, if it's bad enough that it's taking me days to solve, surly there's enough there for an article...). As another example, if things are going swimmingly, there could be some material there, or maybe what I'm doing is mundane enough to not be worth writing about. Just don't assume there will be much rhyme and/or reason to this process, or article consistency.

Content

As was stated before, this project is supposed to be the size of a tutorial, so there won't be a ton of content, and this won't be driven by an actual design doc/spec. I'll also be resisting any temptations to watch or read tutorials, but official documentation is ok. Although, I will make exceptions for specific topics, such as state machines or AI behavior in Godot. Things like that.

The hope is that I'll be able to implement all the major features of a standard platformer, even if they're at a very small scale. There should be 2 enemies, which will imply the combat necessary to dispatch them or be defeated by them. Level progression should be a thing, but I don't intend for there to be a ton of levels (maybe 2 - 3). The game shouldn't be more than 15 - 20 minutes long. There will be pickups in the levels (coins, health pickups, and 1-ups), and a couple of hazards, such as spikes and springboards. Also, naturally, (and since thankfully, someone actually made music specifically for this art pack) some music and sound effects. There's also a parallax background provided, so that'd be nice to throw in there. Finally, the main character will be able to double-jump, slide, pick up and throw boxes, climb ladders, punch the enemies, and all the other usual platformer things.

Regarding the blog itself, the intent is to write about higher-level concepts, such as decisions, learnings, and maybe even some why's. This is an attempt to further grow my ability to think through things and explain them. I'm sure the topics themselves will be in flux for a while as I figure out what makes the most sense to write about, and as I figure out how to do this in the first place. Even the way I write these articles will probably vary for a while. So, all that said, this blog will be inconsistent for a time.

Another note about the blog: I'm going to go ahead and just deal with this now, and do the upgrade to the latest version of NextJS, with the use of the /app folder instead of the /pages folder. This will probably take a little while, since I have to rebuild the projects section, and the newest NextJS went Typescript on me, so that will slow me down (as Typescript is designed to do). There's also a handful of other changes that need to be made to get it back to what it is now.

That should about do it for expectations. Tune in next time, when we will cover the current state of the project (I didn't want to assume that this one would hold up against the other project, but it turns out it has, and there's already been some progress). We should probably go over that for those of you who, for some reason, are following along.