Project: Grim
An old friend
Project: Grim or Grim for short is the first full length game I ever developed. Starting in the summer of 2015 on through the summer of 2016, it was the first time I ever sat down and planned to make a game from start to finish.
Right from the start there were issues. First of all I decided that this was the time to learn how to draw assets for video games. As a result, I'd describe the art style as:
It does the job it needs to do.
Second of all, being a student in the modern age, I entered an era of extreme Imposter Syndrome which inhibited my ability to continue to work on the game greatly. Luckily for me, I'm persistent, and I managed to scrape by and come out with something worth presenting.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly:
I had no god damn idea what I was doing.
How do you make a game from start to finish? Physics? In my 2D platformer? What's an art pipeline? Are sound effects really necessary? How does anyone write anything these days? What's spellcheck? Are playtests necessary or can I just imagine putting this in front of somebody and guess the rest? If I develop a combat mechanic, does that mean I have to put enemies in the game or can it all be just platforming? All of these questions and more you can probably find buried in the source code somewhere.
This was my first serious game ever and it shows. Making content wasn't efficient, I'd get random glitches left and right and decided they were features, entire systems were cut because I lacked the programming knowledge to implement them, and the list goes on and on.
So why is this here?
Simply put, the game was garbage but the experience of making Grim helped me in so many ways that it would be a disservice to not showcase it.
Here's what I learned:
1: Make tools to make your life easier
The process of making levels in Grim was an absolute nightmare. The camera took coordinates as a parameter so that the view of the player was locked into a boxed area defined by the level. How I got those coordinates? Manual labor. By spending at most 2-3 hours to write an editor script, I could have saved myself literal days of debugging.
These days I make an effort to write up a list of tools that I think would help development before I even start coding. That way, when I finally get to the stage where I'm pushing out content, I'm not wasting valuable time doing monotonous work.
2: Don't sweat the small stuff
Due to imposter syndrome, I had to get extremely good at looking at the thing I created and saying:
It's not perfect, but it will do. It's not exactly how I want it to be, but that's okay.
I think this was an extremely important skill for me to learn because not only did it make me complete this game, but it's helped me stop being such a perfectionist and start actually finishing the things that I've started. Comparing a sprite that I spent 3 hours to make and a sprite that I spent 30 minutes to make, you can see which one obviously had more time in it, but in the end it doesn't matter. The 30 minute sprite was just fine, and maybe one day my 30 minute sprites will look like my 3 hour sprites.
3: Game development is a marathon, not a sprint
The most important tool in any game developers toolkit is maintaining a work-life balance. Too many times in development I forced myself down at my desk to do work. Some days this was fine and I felt happy with the work I did, but other days I ended up doing work that ended up having to be redone because the quality was so bad.
Keep in mind, I was working on this game while being a fulltime student, with extra-curricular activities, as well as working with other students on their games. By the time it was summer, the game was in a finished state but I was completely exhausted. I had spent the last 6 months burning myself out and I had no desire to continue working on the game.
Even after the break, development on Grim went from wanting to make a game, to wanting something done and finished.
These days I set reasonable goals, dedicate specific days, and limit my hours working on personal projects (not just games, art, music, etc) to maintain the idea that this is supposed to be fun. At the end of the day, making it past the finishing isn't enough, you have to make it there alive.
Overall, I'm happy with my work on Grim. It doesn't represent the work I'm able to do now, but to me it represents that I'm capable of making a game from start to finish, while also still having a blast while doing it.
Plus, it's nice to see where I started and compare it to where I am now.
As of right now, there is nowhere to download the final build of Grim.
I'm working on getting a number of small bug fixes and quality of life improvements to make the game slightly more presentable on my portfolio. When that's complete, I'll be uploading it to Itch.io.