Well, I said I was going to do it around June 15th, but I wanted to write it now so I can talk about some important decisions I made today and what will happen from now on.

First of all: I’m really really busy for the rest of this month (that’s the reason of “Life!” at the tittle), I couldn’t work on games in my free time as much as I wanted to. I will try to work on it at least 25 minutes everyday and from 2 to 4 hours on weekends. Doing that I can also show that developing games is possible in a tight schedule, it will be a cool experience.

Midnight Journey

I was thinking on it, art, aesthetic, design document and those things. One thing led to another and I ended up calculating how many frames I would have to draw for each character and how much time it would take, the picture below is my results.

I think that 10 minutes by frame is a fair ammount of time

As you can see, if I have my main character (Ethan) and only one boss, I would take around 60 hours just to do the art. Being able to work not even 10 hours weekly would make it a long long long road to finish this game.

Sounds like you are quitting Midnight Journey! No, I am not. It happened that once again I started a game out of my scope (that’s why “Oh No! Not Again!” on the tittle).

I had 2 objectives for Midnight Journey:

1. Fully develop a game all by myself: design, programming, art, sound, marketing, etc…
2. Develop a game that I would love to play and that would reflect who I am.

But it seems that they are two conflicting objectives, in fact, developing games I would love to play (by that I mean games that fits in my favourite styles and genres) would demand a lot of time and a big team. Not realizing it until now was my biggest mistake and the reason why I have 1 or 2 complete games on more than 3 years of game development.

What will I do now? Pretty Simple. I will write a Game Design Document for Midnight Journey, A BIG AND DETAILED GAME DESIGN DOCUMENT. The perfect blueprint of what I want it to be. With the GDD in hands I will have two options:

1. Simplify it so it can fit my schedules. This way Midnight Journey wouldn’t fully accomplish the second objective anymore.
2. Buy Assets/Hire Freelances. This way Midnight Journey wouldn’t accomplish the first objective anymore (and it would cost money, that sucks!)

What is more valuable? For me, Designing and Developing a game that I would love to play and that would reflect who I am is way more important. But anyway, I will finish the Game Design Document so I can make this decision.

BUT!

I won’t be only writing Game Design Documents! I will revisit old ideas and start developing them, specially really really simple mobile games that can be developed under 4 or 5 hours of work. Maybe one of them can be a game where I do everything and then I accomplish that first objective. I will also revisit some not so simple ideas (but more simple than Midnight Journey) and build some demos with cheap or free assets.

EXTRA: I’m actually thinking on developing a simple mobile game each month. I would choose a theme and maybe some restrictions and just try to play with the ideas and try to come up with a game. (Suggestions are welcome!)

P.S.: Probably you are thinking: “But you did nothing the whole month!” – And that’s not true! I did this cool snake game in javascript, which I do not guarantee to be free of bugs.

Next Update: Hmm… It will be sometime around 6th and 15th of July.