I skipped the February update, oh well. Not that I had done a lot, no, all I had for that month was a shooting prototype in Unreal I made in a few hours.

Having time to do side projects in game development has been a Herculean task lately, I’m in between school, which pretty much demands me the same as a full time work, and it is about game development, so also working on it on my side project has a potential to burn me out. On top of that, I still have homework/assignments! On top of that, job hunting has taken a lot of my time lately, and on top of all that, I’m binge-watching The Office.

With all that together, I haven’t been able to have any good progress or anything interesting that I developed in my free time. And the problem here is that I’m taking it too seriously, and I do that a lot, my mindset is always “How can I do an interesting game that can take 2~3 months?”, “What mechanics are interesting for a new game?”, “How to make an interesting progression system so a game can entertain people for hours and hours?”.

And I think the key is to not take it seriously. So my approach now will be prototyping mechanics, simple ideas, prototyping anything, not spending a lot of time and not committing to anything because the purpose of a prototype is to throw it away anyways.

So, anyway, here are some ideas that I tried bouncing off lately.

I was trying to come up with a combat mechanic that plays similar to Astral Chain, which is, I know, very hard, I just started doing it and started playing with launching the character on the attack and transitioning to/from attack animations.

This is a really really simple top-down shooter, I was just messing with the dot product and trying different things and I came up with the idea of a shooter that you can only hit your enemies from behind. Imagine an 8 person match (you and 7 bots, or multiplayer, who knows!) with that idea – It could be a quick and fun small game, 2 minutes of fun!

So that’s what I had for this month! I wrote down a list of small ideas/mechanics/things to prototype, and who knows what is going to be here next month!