Maker's March '26 - Kickoff and Early Days
Sunday, March 29, 2026
Buffalo Game Space is hosting a series of events in what they're calling "Maker's March". The idea is participants should pick a milestone they'd like to complete in a month, then work at it for said month. Along the way there's a series of in-person and virtual working sessions where folks can work on stuff, chat with one another, and provide a source of encouragement and motivation.
I love this idea. Like I said before, I find it hard to keep to self-set deadlines, so having others working on stuff too and setting public expectations on what I hope to achieve is a big motivator for me.
The Milestone
So what's my goal? I want to get a playtest build of my Picross VR project done and in players hands immediately following the end of the four-week period. So far there's only been a very small number of close friends and family that have played earlier prototypes of this game concept, and calling it a playtest is generous. Previously there was a room with a couple puzzles and a (arguably quite cool) virtual tablet that showed your time and puzzle selection options. Not really what I envisioned in total, and definitely not something that worked as a way to introduce people to the game concepts. It required a lot of explanation before I put the headset on someone.
So for this playtest, I want to create something that I can hand to a player and let them just figure it out. Something that teaches the player the mechanics organically, and requires next to no explanation from me on what it is they should be doing. Teaching the player how the puzzles work in particular is an interesting design problem, so that's what I'm taking a stab at first.
Latest Progress
As of this writing, I've participated in the kickoff and the first in-person working session. My first priority was to come up with task list and break it down into sub-deadlines. This let me get everything I think I need to do written down, and by breaking it into sub-deadlines I was able to come up with very rough estimates on how long each task will take. It also helped me narrow scope, which is always key.
I set my tasking up in a Feather Wiki , which I'm a big fan of. It lets me document the project quickly, and the lightweight nature of Feather Wiki allows for including the wiki in the project repo. I created a new page for Maker's March and filled it with a checklist of tasks, broken down into due dates. So far I'm already skipping around, but hey, it's all got to get done and when one task flows into another who am I to say "no, gotta stick to the list".
The main focus of today's work was sketching out concepts for the Gallery and tutorial worlds. The Gallery is my planned hub world for the game, where the player can navigate from world to world. Each world will have a set of puzzles based on a theme. But before getting to that, I started grayboxing the Welcome Center, a portion of the Gallery that will serve as the tutorial area.
After looking up a number of photos inside different galleries and museums, followed by doing a couple thumbnail sketches, I started grayboxing the Welcome Center in Trenchbroom . Trenchbroom, in conjunction with FuncGodot , allows me to quickly prototype 3D environments for my game projects. I'm still pretty green when it comes to Trenchbroom, but I already enjoy it a lot for quickly spinning up something I can walk around in. I can make edits, build the map in Godot, jump into VR and walk around, then jump back to Trenchbroom to make edits super fast. I highly recommend it if you're interested in that sort of thing.
I've called it at a point today where the initial layout of the Welcome Center feels pretty good, building out the bones of the structure from the spawn point all the way to the first room in which the player will get to interact with a puzzle for the first time. Next items to wrap up before this Thursday are adding haptic feedback to the controller interactions, selecting puzzles for the tutorial, and likely some more grayboxing of the tutorial area.