Feeling overwhelmed

Balvamar

I have been working on a project for the last few weekends, and as it has got bigger, so has the need to go back and change things. I have learned that a lack of planning and structure is giving me a headache, and rather than being fun, I now feel stressed. I am not sure how to proceed. Whether to scrap the current protoyype, and replan, or continue to try and alter the one I have. Any opinions, much appreciated. Cheers

jamie_c

Hi @Balvamar, I think that happens to us all, particularly for new users. When I first started with Gamesalad I began creating a platformer game that I had big plans for, but honestly was not ready to be creating in the early days. It still sits on my hard drive waiting for me to finish it. At this point I'd no doubt be better off starting from scratch since I've learned so much more by now.

If you truly feel overwhelmed by the project don't be afraid to set it aside and work on something smaller that you can complete and feel good about. You can always return to the project and complete it later if you want to.

Braydon_SFX

I've had to scrap a project on multiple occasions. Sometimes with 20+ hours of work included. I replan, prototype and then rebuild. Since I already know how the code is going to work, rebuilding is easy. Combine that with the new changes and plans I made and the rebuild was worth it. I don't do this for every project, obviously, but sometimes rebuilding is good as long as you're doing it for the right reasons.

On the other hand, if its only going to take a few hours to go back and fix things, rebuilding may not be the best option.

jonmulcahy

I have a few projects that have hours, weeks or even months in that have been placed on hold. it happens to everyone. sometimes you spend more time trying to force an idea to work with your current implementation that it would be to just start over with a new plan.

goliath

This is exactly what happened with my first project. I thought it was going to be a "simple" game but I was very surprised at how complex it actually came to be. I was able to move on and come back to it and finish it at a later date.

Either way, good luck my man.

jorkos

keep building. scrap prototypes. keep building. scrap projects. keep building.... you get better every day. keep learning. try to release something on the store.

Thunder_Child

@Balvamar ...

Welcome to the club.

I found out...through the forums yes this does happen a lot.

Planning...make tons of notes...then re write them...make kind of a story board with all the attributes you want for each actor. I made a mistake of...after a month of lots of coding to add another feature. I spent so much time have to go line by line adding this one little feature.

Plan it out...think it through. Maybe if you start again with a new build AND stick with it your game will come to a completion. Thise other features may be a good v2.0 in a future update. I litterally have about 10 builds of my slots game before I wrote it allllll down....outline what happens to each character. Even after that I started over once and now...I have a very nearly complete game. Just making tweeks and adding all the effects and such. My game may not even make a dollar but I finally have a build I am VERY proud of. I dont know how long you have been using GS but I have been using GS since Oct 2013 and just now starting to really feel confident about how I can make changes on the fly...because of how I planned my features to be activated....

A good example is using booleans to make things true...vs after an action has taken place.

Fire bullet...when bullet collides with badguy...spawn effects. This is limiting.

Fire bullet, change attribute to "bullet fired".
When bullet collides with badguy, change attribute to "bullet hit badguy".

This second method allows you to add fratures based on the boolean with out searching through your code to find a olace to spawn based on an action. Bookean that mutha !

Thunder_Child

Geez my spelling it horrible ! Typomania !

Hey a game idea !! Hahahaha

Balvamar

Hey, thankyou everyone for your comments my girlfriend and I work as a team. She designs levels, and makes the game fluffy,and I am the one who makes it all work. After starting I have then kept finding better and more efficient ways of doing things. The problem of course is that we have to crawl through multiple actors and attributes to make changes. We have both learned so much with this project so far. We are determined to finish it, as we both love the game. I think we will continue to stumble along with this project, but note the things that give us the most grief, and on the side I'll develop a striped down prototype using what we learn.

Thanks again for everyone's support, you have made me feel much better