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Down with the shark menace!

Hey no worries, we all need a good rant on occasion. Welcome to the community and also to Lemmy! Lurking is totally acceptable btw, albeit kind of a foreign concept to me 😄

We were just talking about scoping in another thread recently and I'm gonna straight-up quote @hodgepodgehomonculus@lemmy.blahaj.zone because honestly their advice in that thread was great. Basically it was to break down your scope into bronze/silver/gold like so:

• Bronze is something you are sure you can complete in the time frame.
• Silver is where you think you can get to if you really push yourself and nothing bad happens
• Gold is where you can go if everything goes right all the time.

That's in the context of a game jam and the time constraints that come with it, but I think it's great advice in general. Whatever your personal limitation might be, whether it is in fact time or maybe it's budget or even your own skill level, there will be a "bronze" level game you can make without too much trouble. Focus on that first, and have your silver and gold stretch goals waiting in the wings for if you complete your original plan. Maybe add a diamond tier for the real pipedream stuff, or whatever works for you!

A lot of solo projects I follow tend to sort of splutter out and die after a few months and it's almost always because the dev finally stepped back, took a lot at how long their ideal scope would take, and understandably noped out. A bit of planning ahead and being realistic with yourself works wonders.

Thanks. I feel like this screenshot maybe makes it look further along than it actually is but never mind 😅

Luckily gamedev Mastodon took pity on me and pointed me in the right direction for the nav stuff lol, I would definitely have been lost otherwise. Still, another thing checked off the "to learn before I'll feel like a real game dev" list! 🙈

Interestingly, that effect has a lot in common with some anti-motion-sickness settings like reducing field of view (in a lot of first person VR games they will literally shutter off your peripheral vision). So that makes a lot of sense!

I saw sh.itjust.works was having major issues last weekend, what a time to sign up! On the blahaj side, our admins announced there might be some downtime while they sort out some infrastructure stuff that was accidentally costing them $3000 a month 😬. Didn't expect the downtime to run quite so long, but we're back now baby!

It's all part of the fun being one of the first to explore this new type of internetting, imo!

If we've convinced you to use version control, honestly I feel like our work is done. It's such a crucial thing to get to grips with especially if you're going to be working with teams or even just looking for employment in the dev space in general. We nag for your own good, I swear 😂

Successful post, hurrah! And relatable, I always convince myself to go with 3d for jams and then regret it when I remember how much simpler things are in 2d. So curious what this was going to end up being, though, I love tile-based things there's just something very satisfying about how orderly they are 😄

Remember if you don't manage to submit, you can always just keep working on your game anyway. Or you can scrap it, take what you learned and put it into your next project! Either way, no harm done, it's all about enjoying the learning process and in the case of a jam, maybe meeting some nice folks who are doing the same thing.

Thanks! Yep, I've been learning how to do AI navigation for the first time so currently they wander randomly around town. Including over bridges between hexes that are currently invisible and only exist in the code 😅

This looks really cool! And there's no arguing with that description, haha, "cheese shaped" indeed.

Nice one, cheers!

(Backup mod account comment - please ignore!)