Cairns Tower Defence - Game A Week #5

Hello, I've challenged myself to make a game every week and publish it, no matter how I feel about publishing it. This is the fifth one so far, and my first attempt at making a tower defence game.

Motivation

By far the biggest issue for me is motivation. Up until last week I was able to put 8+ hours into making games a day, with no complaints. Now though, I find it difficult to put more than 3 hours in. I've been thinking about giving up the game a week challenge but I won't, although an appealing idea is to change it from a week to a fortnight. Now that I've got a little bit of experience under my belt, it may be better for me to try to make some slightly bigger games, and seeing as how I've got University starting soon, I might need the extra week to even be able to make games of the same size, because I'll have a lot more work that isn't just making these games, but for now I'll keep going. I think, though, that motivation has a lot to do with momentum, now that I've got 5 weeks under my belt, it's a lot easier to tell myself to keep going, even if I don't really want to. If I was starting and had zero motivation, I don't think I'd get very far. And at the least it's a feedback loop, you need motivation to do something, but you need to do something to get motivation, if I'm doing something, then I should be building up motivation, right?

Being Unique

I've been thinking recently about how to be more unique, or at least make games that aren't similar to games that have already been made. And so far, all I can say is that it's pretty hard to come up with a good and unique idea. I will eventually get into more experimental games, but I don't think I have enough experience yet to even come up with those ideas. I think a lot of unique games come from our own personal experiences, hobbies and other personal things. For example Noita was made because the developer had experimented and played with falling sand simulations before, leading to him eventually having the idea of bringing that into an actual game. What this means though, is that I have a hard time making these unique ideas, because I have no real unique experiences. Oh well, gotta work on that.

Drums

Something that's come to take over my life more and more recently is drum patterns. I've been focussing on music in general, but for some reason my brain has been focussed on drums a lot more than the other elements, melodies and chords and what not. It's been getting kind of annoying as I'm starting to unconsciously beat box around the house. I think the reason though is that drums feel ridiculously hard for me to figure out, making melodies and bass-lines, while I'm bad at them, are easy enough to understand, and I'm getting slightly better every time. But for drums, I can't seem to make anything other than the good old boots and cats loop, I just don't get what makes drums good. Although I think I've got a better idea now thanks to Noita (again) and their magnificent sound tracks that have really unique and amazing sounding drums, especially the high-hats. And I think the key to making good drums is simply movement in the rhythm, if you have boots and cats for an entire 1 minute song, it's going to get boring, but if you have constantly alternating rhythms of kicks, high-hats, and all the different kinds of percussions and drums, it becomes a lot more interesting. I tried that for the song for this game, and I think it sounds a lot better than my normal attempts, it also helps that I decided to try and move away from that synth feel I've been doing, leading to a more interesting and unique song.

That's it for the major parts of this week, I've learnt a lot more smaller things than this, like art, level design and more, and I've still got a long way to go. Thanks for reading and see you next week.