A Summer of Gamedev Burn Out
It's become the Summer of falling out of love with gamedev for me or maybe it's just another temporary round of significant burn out.
Something about web projects that's very different from working on games is how rapidly a new feature on the web either lives or dies. You can knock out something cool in a weekend or less and get it online and see what people are going to do with it. But a game requires a plan of adding up many private victories that don't amount to anything on their own and which players can't appreciate properly until you spend months at minimum -- often years -- lining it all up.
In this post, I'll show you thoroughly with lots of clips what unfinished thing I built this Summer.
This a continuation from where we left off back in April.
Click Anywhere to Start Videos
Whackable Trees
The tree tops bounce around and throw leaves when you whack them. There are four types of trees in three sizes.
They're nice and just something else to interact with but they don't contribute a lot to the gameplay currently.
Slimes
I realized pretty quickly after doing the trees that what I needed most was an enemy for the player. I have five colors of slime in three different sizes with a variety of behaviors.
Attract and Merge
The small slimes will slowly pull to other small slimes of the same color if they are close enough. Medium slimes will pull to other medium slimes. And these will create big slimes when they connect and merge. They have a nice magnetic jiggle-smash into each other.
Shoot Projectiles
Once the big slimes form, they start shooting little slimes at the player.
This causes a problem that it's then possible for slimes to infinitely spawn, resulting in scenarios that feel broken in multiple dimensions. I wasn't fully decided what to do about that immediately. So I added more details to the slime's behavior.
Can Be Squished
Small slimes can be walked over and will be briefly squished when stepped on. The squished state slows their movement.
Can Be Pushed
Medium slimes can be pushed away. They aren't yet a threat and if there isn't enough of them, it should be easy to prevent them from merging.
Culling
As cool as it was to watch projectile slimes merge into bigger slimes, I decided that when acting as projectiles, they can't merge and will de-spawn after a short period.
As Obstacles
- getting hit by projectile slime results in player knock back
- stepping on small slimes results in a temporary reduction of player speed
This leads to...
Player Dodge Roll
What game would be complete without it.
It's rudimentary in the above clip but it will eventually (before the post is over) give the player agency when trying to avoid being hit.
New Map
"Right now I'm working on adding new maps and polishing the existing features to work in new ways presented by the new maps. This is mainly reworking collision groups, making it so that different types of objects interact correctly..."
Land Bridge to Cross River
It wasn't originally a river. It was going to be an ocean, but I had this land bridge going somewhere and I just happened to have a bunch of good river assets. So I went with that.
You can't see it here but there's a lot of nice stuff like fish swimming around and plants swaying. The current version has even more stuff; you'll see that later.

Abandoned Town Over Ridge
I wanted this area to be an immediate curiosity when you get to the other side but still just out of reach. You know it's there but you don't know what mysteries it might entail.

It's an early concept but yeah.
Collapsed Stone Highway
It's a bit jank but you can cross the collapsed bridge by walking over the flat rocks. You can also walk over the river if there are flat rocks beneath you.
I dread having to remember the particularities of how the collision works here when I go back to this. I also have to think about how these cave entrances have no where to go and are just for show so far.
Milestone
"The goal is to have a short section players can run through and experience the slimes so I can get feedback on them.
There's a lot of problems here but you can see what I'm working towards. I decided to lay out a to-do list of things I needed to accomplish in order to make it come together.
To-Do List
- Idle Time Passing
- periodically save time and state
- at game start calculate time since last save,
- apply an increment to "eggs" or other resource value
- on game start, inform player what has changed
- make sure it works:
- on Desktop
- on HTML5 Debug
- on HTML5 Production
- Resource Trading
- decide on energy resource the player trades currency resource in town to have
- This will represent ability to take damage and time to live in the wild.
- at the town gate, energy resource is spent to embark into wilds.
- decide on NPC graphics to put there. I have a few things in mind.
- Surviving the Wild
- Time to Live is calculated from energy resource, spent to leave town
- A killed enemy or a destroyed barrel has a chance to drop currency or energy
- energy immediately converts to TTL
- Hit trees have a chance to drop egg nests.
- Taking a direct hit from a projectile slime decreases TTL.
- Make sure it is balanced so that it is impossible to get past the northern slime infestation.
- On death, game over message + set all three resources 0 and inform player of losses + return to town
- when Idle Time Passing is finished:
- inform player of resources gathered in town while in wilds
- Dialog System
- do not over-build any dialog or guis
- use something simple until more features are planned
Dialog System
I immediately broke my own guidelines and spent slightly too long working on a dialog system.
It's not bad system at least. It has just enough to feel decent to consume text.
Some features of it are:
- If you press the button while dialog is printing, it will quickly print the whole message.
- If you press the button when the dialog is printed, it will close the box.
- It will avoid prematurely closing the box when the player is only wanting to advance more quickly.
- Player movement is not interrupted during dialog.
- If you move far enough away from where dialog is initiated, it will automatically terminate.
- The amount of space for dialog is kept intentionally low, to reinforce that there is no place for text dumping.
Something I dislike about it: The color of the box matches the color of the dirt too exactly. It's too easy for the pop up to blend in and go unseen.
"Mews and Juslims"
In the video above, you'll notice the stupid joke. It came about when...
In this asset pack, there are very few town people. Most NPCs are enemies that you fight: goblins, knights, orcs, desert warriors. There aren't many common people to fill your towns with. The artist is working on additional clothing and hair styles which would allow you to have variations of the player in town to use as town people, but at this time, most of that is not finished, and the best option are these desert nomads.
It just so happens that... Yeah.
So I made this joke and no less than two people hated me for it without forgiveness. Both individuals have shunned me ever since. One of them said he would have to murder me if I did not take this out of the game.
A few days later there was the whole escalating conflict with Iran and Israel.
Anyway, I probably should take this out and just pretend it never happened but...
(Please laugh)
Resource Trading
I decided to take the short cut of handling resource exchange with a similar gathering mechanic as the original egg collecting.
If you have raw eggs when you approach a campfire, it will begin the cooking scenario, in which cooked eggs are generated and can be collected. It's not entirely realistic but neither is the rest of it.
Surviving the Wild
This isn't finished, but I have it set up so that if you exit town without cooked food, you will be teleported back to town. Your resource will slowly decrement over time and when you take hits, and if you run out of cooked eggs, you will teleport back to town having lost everything you carry. It's a rudimentary game loop where there is still no reward for succeeding.
Idle Time Passing
Haven't started this at all.
And That's Where I'm At
I don't think the game is fun in it's current state. It's definitely not presentable to an average gamer but I probably do need the input of other gamedevs about where I should go with it. But the bigger problem is that I have no desire to work on it.
Cautionary Lesson for Other Gamedevs
Something happens to your confidence when you go from trying to figure out what you can make yourself with free assets to having whatever you could possibly need after paying an artist for a thorough asset bundle. This is especially true when the art is not your specialty and something you struggle to do on your own. Once this problem is solved for you, you begin to justify increasing the scope of your game to something you otherwise wouldn't have.
When I started, it was all I wanted to do and I could add anything I wanted to add because I paid for the ability to do that. But I've hit a point where I just don't want to work on it right now. I know that I'll eventually come back to it, same as I always come crawling back to my old projects. But at the moment, the will just isn't there.
I'll let you know when that changes.