OGAM - August

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

This past month I started doing One Game A Month. I've spent the better part of the last few months buying a new house and moving, so I'd fallen off the making stuff train for a while; doing OGAM seemed like a neat way to try to get back into the swing of making content, especially now that I've got my own office. I set a couple goals for myself for the first month:

• Start developing games (or game-like content) again
• Get a feel for what it's like to create content in the new office, and figure out what's good, what's not, and how I can improve my new workspace

For the first month, with the theme One-Liner , I decided to try my hand at making something I've never tried developing before: an RPG combat system. I should probably note that this was something I'd already been thinking about trying to make before OGAM, so naturally I attempted to shoehorn the theme in. Rather than casting spells, the player characters would rack up Cool PointsTM as they land attacks. Once their CP meter was full, they could execute a one-liner. Rather than casting "Ice" or something, they'd say something fitting of the character, and a major attack that thematically matched the one-liner would take place. For example, a character could say "Everybody, chill! ", and the result would be a large party-wide ice attack.

As is typically the case, I didn't fully grasp just how much work and planning would be required to build out a flexible RPG combat system, and I didn't quite finish. If I had to guess, I'd say it's abouy 60%-70% there, with logic for queueing battle actions, triggering animations, and processing some of the action types. A lot of the remaining work involves connecting all the pieces together, which is also when I tend to find that I don't like the way certain systems work so I get distracted and try to rewrite it. I'd say I rewrote the whole thing probably two and a half times over the course of August.

So did I meet my goals for the month? Kinda, honestly. Even though I didn't finish the system, I am happy with the work I did on it, and I do plan on completing it at some point so I can use it with other projects. (sidenote: I don't know how it happened, but I've only just started really enjoying playing JRPGs. Something about gaining patience in my old age, I guess.) And as for what it's like making content in my new office, it's definitely nice but there's room for improvement. A proper desk would probably go a long way, for starters. Some better storage/organization for art supplies would be good too. But a good start, for sure.

If you're interested in taking a look at the project, I've posted the source over on my Github .