I'm only 1 day late with this post so in theory I'm getting better at this.

In a way this past week was overall good for my productivity, even though what I actually did was relatively little. I say it's good because I came to two good realisations.

1 - I am not a keen level designer.

For the robot/shooter prototype I'm working on, I was trying to figure out what was making me stall with progress. I was thinking up systems and enemies and narrative beats all relatively easily. And then I discovered that when it came to putting levels together, that's when I started pausing. The actual nitty gritty of carving out a space, figuring out a route, knowing best where each enemy and pick up should go.

So I tried to steamroll past this issue and just start making levels and putting things in them. I'm going to treat it like writing, where you do a first draft and then once that's complete, you forget about it for a few days before going back to it and pruning all the crap that didn't work.

2 - I need specific goals to aim for when learning something

I've whinged on here for a while now that although UE Blueprints are undoubtfully something very useful to learn, I haven't been motivated to continue learning it. I thought it was just because I wasn't enjoying the actual process of learning and trying to make stuff in it. In actuality, I think it's because - similarly to the level design issue - I didn't know what direction to go in.

When you've got a tool that you can go an infinite number of directions with, it can be overwhelming to even know where to start. To combat this, I decided to learn a very specific thing or things one at a time. I decided to go with learning how to make a basic first person shooter first. So I found a tutorial and followed the steps and made the following:

It's basic and ugly and the camera doesn't turn with the mouse yet, but it was cool learning the most basic of basics to get this working.

Coincidentally, it's these kinds of limits which I think end up producing the best creativity. The issue with the player only able to really move forward with limited aiming made me wonder if there'd be a game in that. A literal corridor shooter where your movement is limited and you have to take on enemies in an extremely tight space.

Anyways, those were my two realisations this week and what I got up to. 

Other miscellaneous things done in the past week:
 - Carried on with my production work
 - Enrolled in the Pixelles writing portfolio program
 - Wrote up and recorded my thoughts on Dishonored (2012) and was going to put out a video but Adobe Rush decided to be a drama about it
 - Added lightning hazards to the shooter prototype
 - Added most of the enemy spawning logic for the Hooligans​ prototype

So this isn't really week 9 as it's ignoring like 3 weeks of holiday time I selfishly took for myself over Christmas, but whatever. The Christmas break was one that I very much needed and enjoyed. I was mindful to not really do any kind of games related work, or any work at all for that matter. The one thing I did focus on was completing a screenplay.

The BBC does an open call for screenwriters twice a year, and for near enough a decade I'd been meaning to submit something​. But I always just about missed the window, or saw it too late to actually write anything of substance, or didn't have the energy and time to put into a script. This year, with me being only partially employed and having stumbled on the call with still a month to go before the deadline, I made it my goal to write and submit something.

Ironically enough the story I went with was one that originated from a game world that I conjured up in university together with some friends. It wasn't my intention. I just realised whilst brainstorming that this was the world that was most fleshed out in my mind, that had interesting things going on in it, and could accommodate multiple characters with vastly differing motivations. So I spent a month on it, had enough time for re-writes, and submitted it without issue (as far as I know). I doubt it will get anywhere (previous open calls had something like 4000+ entries and only 20 people get called back), but it was a personal goal of mine to finish and submit a script, and I did. So yay for me.

Outside of that I did apply to some game design roles I found, and am waiting to hear back. Similar to the script thingy though this is a game of numbers. Usually you have to do dozens of applications before you even get a call back from anywhere (or even a response), so I expect to be applying for quite some time. This isn't helped by the fact that junior game designer roles are rarer than big foot sightings.

And to close out, here are some quick fire things I did do over the past week or so:
 - Started on further prototyping for the "Home" games for the Hooligans concept
 - Joined an online program to help with creating a games writing portfolio
 - Finished Dishonored (finally)
 - Finished my UX design course (finally)
 - Finished the Will Wright Game Design Master Class course (now I need to go through the accompanying booklet and look at the challenges/exercises it provides)

Another horrifically late post. My multi-tasking skills took a hit lately with me simply trying to do too many things at once and planning to do this post ASAP but finding other things to do instead. Nevertheless, here it is for the yearning masses.

So what have I been up to for the past two and a bit weeks? I started my part time work for a small indie games company, assisting with all things production. It's been fun so far and it's been nice to get exposed to a smaller scope of work compared to my last role. Can't say anything about what is being  worked on yet but believe me once it's announced I'll be plastering it all over the gaff.

Outside of that my two biggest focuses have been the continued work on the Hooligans prototype and trying to get my first script finished for the BBC Writers Room deadline. For those that don't know, the BBC runs two open script calls twice a year. The scripts have to meet a bunch of requirements (be 30 pages minimum, be formatted correctly, etc) and the deadline is the start of January. I'm about ten pages into the 30 page minimum, and that currently consists of just over 2000 words. I'm hoping to finish a first draft around Christmas/Boxing Day, and that gives me another week or so to go over the script and trim out all the bits that suck.

I believe last year that the BBC received something like 3000+ scripts and less than around 20 people get selected to go into the Writers Room program. So I'm not expecting to make it that far, but a goal/dream of mine for ages has been to submit a complete script for something like this. So hopefully this year I can at least get that far.

In terms of game dev work, Hooligans work has taken up the majority of it. The past week (or longer) has been taken up by bugs in some of the core functionality. Issues to do with fan entities drifting away from their controlling entities, and that then screwing with collisions/interactions/detection etc. I've spent some time on said issue and whilst there have been some improvements, I honestly can't think of a way to solve it at the moment that would be practical. So I'm looking to ignore this issue for now (it only happens in specific cases), and move onto implementing more bits of actual gameplay flow.

I've only just realised that I haven't posted any gifs from the most recent versions of the Hooligans prototype, so please enjoy those below: 

In the previews these GIF's look like garbage (in terms of resolution), but they might get better after I post this. If not I'll just describe them. This was the update prototype where we had the group of fans now essentially all being one entity, where as before they were all separate objects with their own pathing/movement logic that would all attempt to move as one. The constant problem was that all of these separate objects would always eventually converge onto the same position and disappear behind each other. I looked for a bunch of ways around this but it became absurd.

Another issue was the fact that having potentially dozens/hundreds of these individual objects all trying to path find to the same point caused plenty of bugs, or just straight up didn't work as you would expect it to. So we opted to go with a single, large entity that would spawn all of the characters, and have them move in sync with the entity it self. It means just one entity now has to do the path finding, and we get rid of a bunch of issues.

Unfortunately there are still plenty of other issues. The aforementioned bug with the enemy characters drifting from the enemy entity (and a similar issue with the player characters/player entity. And the pathfinding still isn't bullet proof and will lead to instances of the player's group taking the longest possible route through what should be a straight line. But we at least now have enemy groups that move, chase the player, attack and stop following if the player gets too far.

And in completely unrelated news I also finally recorded, edited and uploaded my "Thoughts On The Last Of Us Part 2". It's a mess, it's got dodgy audio and I think a few of my points are quite rambly, but I'm OK with it. It also led to me using ye olde Photoshop to make my first thumbnail, so go me. My "Thoughts On Uncharted" video will be next, and I'm already looking to trim down the script on that bad boy, since I really can't be arsed to do 10+ minute videos right now. For your viewing pleasure, here is the vid:

Week six. I've hit that point where I'm constantly thinking to myself "You really should have more to show at this point." In the same go six weeks feels like nothing. On my whiteboard I've kept a count of how many "work days" I've done since starting this. Today is work day 31. Another metric is that it is the last day of November which is also terrifying.

I'm trying to not get caught up in this terrifying thought process but it is difficult to ignore. The good news is that I have found paid, part-time work which is somewhat related to the goals I'm looking to achieve. So I can hold off poverty for a little while longer, whilst feeling useful and hopefully learning some new stuff along the way. In terms of weekly updates:

My losing streak with Unreal Engine Blueprints continues. I'm not sure what my beef is. I think the one shot tutorials may not be as motivating as the long form video tutorials I followed before, which presented with you a more grand final product. I'll try to take a look at some different tutorial series' this week to hopefully get me back on track.

A lot of effort this week has continued to go into the Hooligans prototype. Me and the other fellow working on it had a few more conversations regarding the current state of the prototype. We agreed that there were still some significant challenges regarding the technical aspects. Simply put, this is my first time trying to make something with RTS elements and there are a lot of considerations to keep in mind. Controlling multiple units instead of one, providing instructions to multiple enemies and different enemy types, pathfinding, the list goes on and on.

We decided that we would simplify the backend further to allow us to proceed. Now instead of there actually being dozens of individual objects with their own code and pathfinding, there will instead be one entity, with multiple objects spawned around it. It will still look like a big group of different units but they will all move, stop and attack at the same time. This same behaviour will be used for the enemy AI as well. It's less dynamic and admittedly leads to fewer player options, but frankly if we don't make this change then we might as well stop making the game at this point.

I didn't make any headway on my other prototype unfortunately this week. Again, I'm starting to find myself blocked slightly on where I need to go next with it. I think the last problem I had was with doors and how I wanted different doors to function - without it becoming a complex mess like in my previous attempts. I'll try to put some time into sketching out exactly how I want the gameplay to unfold, as right now I'm just stumbling in the dark.

And lastly on the Twine front I made more progress with the story. It hasn't been the 1000 words a day as I had hoped (I'm only at 2300 total), but there is still progress. Hopefully I can make a significant dent in the remaining word count this week.

Cor blimey, week five of this fountain of fun? A-mazing. What the hell did I achieve this week?

Following on from my comments last week about not exactly falling in love with Unreal Blueprints, this week I did zilch with it. That wasn't actually on purpose and I didn't realise I'd done nothing in Unreal this week until this very moment when I sat down to write this. I'll put a bigger focus on it next week and continue with the one-shot tutorials. But for now, moving on: 

A lot more time went into my Gamemaker and Twine work. On the Gamemaker front I managed to make decent progress on my own prototype for Mark II. The design is remaining intentionally simplistic since every time I try to make something complex it tends to spiral out of control.

I changed up weapons so that they can now be found and picked up. And added in an ammo system for weapons, except for the starting laser (in case the player finds themselves in a hostile spot and zero ammo). I also did some work on doors so that I've got every type of door I need (for now) to facilitate different levels of off limit areas. Work was also started on a new "proper" area/level so that I can start progressing the game, as I feel I've been slightly stuck on how to proceed for a while now.

Progress was also made on the Hooligans/semi-RTS game, but not significantly enough to warrant new footage. Behind the scenes we had a bunch of conversations about a few areas of the design. So whilst there isn't loads to show on the front end, on the back end there's been a lot discussed and confirmed/clarified.

On the Twine front I managed to make some headway and I have a rough idea of where I want the story to go. As I'm still quite new to Twine I'm still learning the basics - but I did manage to learn about $variable's and got my own rudimentary implementation into the story (involving throwing up, no less). Simultaneously I'm reading "Stephen King On Writing" who suggests jotting down 1000 words a day, six days a week, as a goal. I managed to achieved that once this week. So if I can double (or, gasp, triple) that this week, I'll be happy.

Lastly, I edited and tightened up the writings I had done on both the Uncharted series, and The Last Of Us Part 2. I know I want to make these as review/critique videos but haven't got round to recording the narrations for them yet. Mostly due to my cringing at my own vocal performance. I'll aim to at least record some kind of narrations next week. But I can't promise I won't immediately delete them afterwards. 

The fourth week of this tumultuous time comes to an end, and just as before, this post is a bit late. But this week I have a reason. It's not a good reason, but it's a reason. I decided at the eleventh hour to choose Sunday as the day that I wouldn't turn on my computer. I'm on it for like ten hours a day every day and I think my eyes are about ready to hand in their notice. So one day a week I will not use my PC or laptop. Phones, tablets, giant TV's are all ok though.

This past week went slightly better than week three. With there being more productivity and less US Election nail biting. I'm still not up to what I would consider 100% productivity. I feel like my days seem to end much quicker than I want and my figurative "Done" pile is always smaller than I would like. Nevertheless, progress has been made.

First up is Blueprints. As mentioned last week, I've started looking at the One-Shot tutorials from the Unreal YouTube channel. I only did one or two this week, with the focus being on shooting custom projectiles. In this instance, a flaming office chair:

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about Blueprints at this stage. It's obviously a powerful and very useful tool and is probably the closest I will ever get to solo-developing something of AAA standards. But I can't help but feel that it might not be for me. It can be learnt fairly quickly and it shows interesting results almost immediately but I haven't yet found myself being absorbed by it or feeling particularly inspired by it. I'll continue the tutorials and see if my feelings change over the next few weeks.

Next up I continued my prototyping in GameMaker Studio 2. The semi-RTS project continues to be a major focus. I was given feedback regarding how Hero characters should behave and how this relates to the special abilities the player can use. In brief, the abilities should be presented more as a loadout, rather than as a set of skills provided by Hero characters. To that end, Hero characters were no longer expected to be shown as their own bespoke characters.

I have no idea why one GIF is clear and the other one is blurry when they've both come from the same video file but whatever. What is actually happening in these clips?

On the left we show the new loadout/ability select screen. Where as before it was simply select one of each type of Hero/Ability, now you can select multiple of one ability and stack them. It's difficult to see but in the bottom right the icons now show how many times you can use each of said ability.

On the right you can barely make it out but the first thing that happens is the player activating their invisibility ability by clicking the green icon. The on screen characters change into their incognito outfits to represent this. But we also have the startings of attacking structures. The big red square is an enemy building/structure. The characters move towards it, animate and turn red to represent their attacks. Once the building goes grey, it has been destroyed.

There is a lot still wrong with the prototype. Biggest issue currently is that movement doesn't feel satisfying, and the building attacking is still jank central. But all things considered, I'm still happy with progress. Intention is to start prototyping enemy units next.

Finally I decided to start putting a focus on writing and narrative design this past week. Utilising my limited Twine skills, I went to https://videogamena.me/  and started generating random game titles. I landed on "Alcoholic Rabbit Alpha" and immediately loved it and started writing/Twining. Having just finished the EXCELLENT Disco Elysium, I have no doubt that whatever I end up writing is essentially going to be partial rip-off of that game.

​It's still early days but hopefully I can put my own flavour on it. As time goes on I see myself fantasising more and more about something closer to narrative design than the more technically minded types of design.

Hopefully that is an actual deep and true preference I have, and not just because writing comes easier to me than visual scripting. Either way, stay tuned for next week!

This is a bit late, but here we are at the end of week three of Funemployment. Unfortunately I got a tad distracted in the preceding week due to the US Election, which for some reason I was glued to like a fly to very smelly jam. It also wasn't helped by the fact that my internet was out for like two days for absolutely no reason. But, no matter, we continue.

As mentioned, my productivity was shocking last week, most notably my Unreal Engine work suffered the most. I found a YouTube playlist consisting of numerous "one-shot" tutorials created by Unreal themselves, so I will be continuing to go through that. The last tutorial from the series that I watched showed how to make actors/objects disappear after colliding with them. Go for pick-ups/collectibles etc. Alas I have no new footage of anything I worked on in Blueprints though.

I did make some headway with Gamemaker Studio 2 though. A lot of focus has been on a prototype I am working on with a friend for an RTS style type game. But this is purely made up of units getting to an objective - there is no base building/resource gathering etc. I've never tried making an RTS before so a lot of the technical side of things is new to me. Having multiple units to move, having them perform actions, making sure they're moving where you went them to go correctly and all that. There was also the added complexity of having different abilities for you to use depending on the types of unit you start with.

Since everything is still very prototypey and abstract, I'll explain. You start by selecting your main Hero characters - each with a different ability. At the start of the level these abilities are represented as icons in the bottom right. Upon clicking the green icon this activates a stealth mode for the group - hilariously depicted as them all wearing flasher trench coats and trilby's.

It's still very early days but I am happy with the progress that has been made here - and it is a significant departure from the previous prototypes I've tried to make.

Another area I've been working in but haven't shown much of here is with Adobe Xd - a wireframing and prototyping program. It's not exactly game design related, but I figured being able to wireframe and prototype mobile friendly designs couldn't hurt. The most recent tutorial I did was to cover creating a "high fidelity" furniture website mock-up. 

There's a lot of things I don't like about the final product, but it looks a lot better than my previous efforts. I'm looking forward to continuing the tutorial series (I'm around two thirds through) and seeing how I can apply this to future design work.

Lastly, I spent a chunk of time writing down all of my thoughts on the Uncharted series. I have spent a significant amount of time on Twitter whinging about the Uncharted games and chronicling my time with the four mainline games and how much I haven't enjoyed it. I'm deciding whether I want to do this purely as a written piece, or if I want to go to the full effort of presenting it in video form. Guess we'll see.

That's it for week three. I'm hoping by next weeks posting I've got this schedule under a bit more control.

Week two of funemployment has come and gone and some bits were fab and others were not so fab. The good parts being that I managed to continue to progress in almost all areas that I wanted to progress in (with the exception of writing), continued to tidy up a bunch of real life admin, and stick to my workout routine. The bad parts were mostly the fact that I wasn't able to keep to my intended schedule, and lost out on a lot of productivity and time due to it.

Nevertheless, we move.

One of the highlights was probably the fact that I managed to do some much faster prototyping during the week that meant I had created more gameplay in a few days than I had in the past few months. 

​So what's going on in the above GIF? You are the blue circle with the red triangle face. The blue circles with the red outlines and the red circles are enemies. You can shoot green bullets, the blue enemies shoot red bullets, and the red enemies just charge at you once you get close enough. The yellow circle is a shield that blocks attacks. In the bottom right is an overheat meter - it goes up the more you shoot and if it maxes out, your weapons are locked for a short time (but you can still use your shield).

It is primitive but even in that short clip you can see a moment where I almost got blind sided by one enemy whilst fighting another enemy and accidentally overheating my weapon. Hopefully next week I can make further additions to the prototype.

I also threw together a quick test for pathfinding in GameMaker: Studio (which it turns out is better supported than I originally though). It comes in the form of a point and click test where you control one big character who is in turn being followed by a bunch of smaller characters.

On the Unreal Engine Blueprints front, my progress was a bit more tempered. I finished the initial intro tutorial to blueprints (it is excellently explained and can be found here for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFXMW_UEDco&ab_channel=UnrealEngine) which covers things like interactions, creating a blueprint and messing with the construction code.

The above GIF just shows an initial structure I've created, some particles added in for a effect, and a sliding door that activates once you get near it. I wanted to have it open when you press a button on a nearby console but that ended up being way more complicated than I anticipated. Maybe next week.

4 weeks ago I left my job as a games producer at a large, AAA game developer. 3 weeks ago I was hurriedly tidying and emptying out my apartment ahead of a looming move out date. 2 weeks ago I moved back in with my very understanding and accommodating parents. 1 week ago I started on a number of tutorials/courses in things that I hope will lead to a job closer to something that I enjoy doing.

After flipping and flopping for some time I decided to end my role in games production. Although I had enjoyed it and found great satisfaction in some of my work over the years, it was becoming clear to me that it wasn't what I wanted to do going forward. Design is where I wanted to be, and design was what I had always wanted to move into one way or another.

Focusing on what design exactly however was the problem whenever I thought about this switch. Level, systems, technical, narrative, etc. There are so many different design disciplines (and going into larger companies it gets very specific) that I never knew exactly where I wanted to aim. In the abstract I knew what I wanted to do. It essentially boiled down to:

• Tell a good story
• Provide a memorable experience

With those things in mind I restarted my tutorials/learning of the following software:

• Unreal Engine 4 Blueprints
• Adobe Xd
• Twine 2

This was in addition to my continued use of GameMaker Studio 2, which I am already familiar with. I'm still not entirely sure in which direction I want to go in or what kind of role I want to end up in. But I've at least now got the headspace, energy and opportunity to be able to pursue these potential avenues for me to go down.
​

​In summary, I managed to achieve the following this week:

• Created a basic level in UE4 using Blueprints
  • Setting up geometry, applying textures and using a bit of visual scripting for some interaction
• Created a number of mock ups using Adobe Xd following the Udemy course
  • Got to the stage of creating interactive prototypes
• Started the Will Wright Game Design MasterClass (thoughtfully gifted to me by my coworkers upon me leaving)
  • It's a very high level type of class (so far) but it does present a number of interesting ideas and approaches to design, with a focus on player choice, freedom and community

Not too bad for the first week, but a lot of this was basically going over stuff I had previously learnt when I first started some of these tutorials. I'm hoping to provide another update the same time next week to keep myself accountable and to help motivate myself to keep pursuing this direction.

Different kind of post for today (or this year). This one is about my own personal game development.

You wouldn't know it due to the complete lack of publicity I give to it, but I do actually attempt my own game designs and developments. I write down ideas or sketch out possible game features. I prototype using GameMaker Studio 2 and have spent an ungodly amount of time browsing forums and search results for solutions to some of the most trivial bugs. All that is to say that making a game is quite hard.

The fact that we have games at the scope and scale that we have today, more often than not as an actual comprehensive whole, is almost miraculous. Most people don't know what goes into making a game, and making it fun. Making it pleasurable to the senses and making enough of it to warrant its price tag. Some people think they know what goes into making a game. They think that it's enough to have an idea, to assign the button layout and describe how many enemy types there will be and roughly what the art style is. 

Until you actually try taking an idea from conception to delivery, you will never know how difficult it truly is. There is doubt every step of the way. You have a cool idea but the moment you put the idea into code, hack together some art and put it all on screen for the first time, you realise your idea is trash. Or slightly more optimistically, it's not trash, but there are now a dozen problems that immediately surface, and your idea will need to change. It now needs to accommodate several changes to deal with a dozen problems. This takes time. You work through the dozen problems, implement your several solutions, and eventually, you have your updated prototype.

This process may go on for hours, days, weeks, months, etc. An idea can potentially be worked on for a significant amount of time before the person or persons realises it's no longer worth pursuing. That no matter how many changes are added, the idea itself simply isn't fun, or possible to make fun. Worse yet, some people or companies discover this and keep going anyways. Whether due to cynical or financial motivation, they simply keep going, aiming for that finish line and shipping off a thing that they know they don't like, in an attempt to make some kind of profit to offset all their spent time and resource.

I have found myself struggling with prototyping for a while now. Even before Corona was a thing (although that didn't help matters much), I had struggled to get my ideas onto a screen, and iterate on them in meaningful ways. My most recent attempt was the following:

These are screenshots of the same section of level from various different stages and builds

This was the most recent prototype of Mark II, a metroivania-esque game that I originally thought of nine years ago for my final year university project. For ages I wanted to make it "properly", and spent literal years thinking about different aspects of the game. However, when it came time to actually put something on-screen, I realised all that time thinking about the game had been essentially meaningless.

Ideas about the number of weapons and abilities there would be and how they'd all be connected swiftly went out the window the moment I tried playing with them. It turns out trying to use two different weapons at once using the left and right mouse buttons isn't that fun or intuitive. Who would've guessed. Over the months I would come to realise that a lot of the ideas I had about how parts of this game would work simply wouldn't be fun or intuitive. A lot of it would need re-thinking.

And there was the question of the development of the game itself. I was starting linearly and chronologically. The first thing I was developing was the very start of the game, and that's because I knew exactly how I wanted that to look, how those first crucial minutes should play out. Another mistake. Focusing so much on little details in this opening section meant I was pouring large amounts of time into things that would very likely change as I progressed onto other areas of the game.

It also meant I wasn't spending any time developing and playing more core aspects of the game. Yes the opening became exactly what I wanted it to be, and played out in the way that I had envisioned, but then I started looking at general gameplay. I hadn't thought about what kind of puzzles the player would need to solve, or how they would solve them. How would the enemies interact with the player, and with each other? What pickups would the player acquire, and how would the player make upgrades to themselves?

All of these were things that had been given very little thought outside of surface level ideas. And as I continued adding things to the game, it became apparent it wasn't getting any more fun. I was adding complexity and systems, but nothing that actually engaged the player. Nothing that added to the original core vision of the game. Everything was getting so complex to the point I began hesitating working on the game as I knew it would mean diving into ageing code that was barely holding together.

This is all to say that prototyping is extremely difficult. I wrapped up the most recent version of Mark II and began anew with a more streamlined vision. And a promise to myself that I would work on the start of the game last. For now, I'm focusing on one test room with walls and static enemies, and figuring out the core gameplay. What will the player use, how will they use it, and what will the environment have to be like to accommodate this gameplay. 

Making games is difficult, as in prototyping. So, prototype early, prototype often, cut away the things that don't fit, don't start at the beginning, and don't think too much about it.