Normal Test - Devlog

Hey, it's been a bit since I made a game, I think it's only actually been like three weeks but it felt like a year. But nevertheless I am back, not with game a week, but at least for this jam. And, as I've been busy with university stuff, I only had like 5 days and a teaspoon of motivation to make this game, but I'm actually pretty proud of this one.

Animation

I watched this GDC talk by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho about game juice, and how to make games that feel good to play, and after watching the talk I wanted to make this game as juicy and responsive as I can. And in the end, it all comes down to animations, which I'm not a fan of, or wasn't until I finally let myself use a tween. Tweens are my new favourite thing, I don't have to create 50 timers and booleans to express all the different animations anymore, I just let tweens do that boring stuff for me. With the introduction of tweens, making the game juicy was way easier, and I ended up making all of the animations in this game within an hour or two. If you haven't used tweens I highly highly recommend them, here's a simple animation that would have be painful to do without tweens but took 20 seconds with them:

Simple, I know, but it's this sort of stuff that makes games feel good.

Game Design

Now that I'm a game design student, I've decided to actually think for at least a second on the design of the game, what I want the player to experience, what's the gameplay like, etc. And I think that I can already say that I'm a better game designer (after only like three weeks of uni lol) just because I thought about some stuff. I've only really learnt about two major concepts so far: Intended player experience, and moment to moment gameplay. These might sound like super basic things everyone who's making games should know about, but I'm one of those people that sort of just does what they feel is right, I don't normally think about that fancy stuff. But thinking about those really helps. I'll probably keep learning things, testing things and then talking more about game design here and there, I've noticed that there is a real lack of game design content on the internet. Let me know if you know of any online game design content!

For the future

I can tell that I'm improving at a really fast rate now, just because I am trying more different things, and I think I'm getting ready to make some bigger games, so instead of game a week I might start a game a fortnight, or game a month. Though uni will get in the way of those, there's a lot of stuff I want to get into in the future, so look forward to it!