Unreleased - How to make spaghetti without pasta, Falling Islands development

This project is dead. It's been dead for the last two years and the two years before that. Programming became a nightmare,  powerups affected one another, scope grew beyond control, the general tone and aesthetic transformed several times, and the project's initial vision was lost as development went on.

That's the end of it, that was what became of it about five years ago, but let's rewind to 2016 to find out how it started and how it got to be the tangled, sloppy and delicious unfinished game of mine I like to refer to as the "spaghetti game" when I mention it to my friends. 

A short story and a brand new gamedev

It was a simpler time, I was fresh out of high school and had just finished a 2d game development course on unity to the point I thought was "satisfactory" for me. Of course, going into college I had high hopes for the future and could not wait until the semester started to start doing something productive.  A colleague I had had just shown me a short story he had wrote a couple of months before and I asked if I could make a game out of it, and he agreed. 

The story, focused on a man contemplating life as he fell towards the ground from a distance unknown. I was not a very introspective person back then but I loved the setting, so I wanted to give it a shot. 

The basic game flow went like this:

The player (man) would jump off of a platform or "checkpoint" towards a blue sky limited by screen width while avoiding airborne obstacles like birds, planes, buildings and more, once the level was complete, the man would fall for an small amount of time while his thoughts fade in as text on the screen, telling a part of the story. 

The game would be exactly as long as needed for the story to be told, since it was a short story it was decided the scope of the game would be a small one. 

As a rookie programmer turned gamedev, art, sound design, music, and UI were left as afterthoughts. At the time I believed a game worked just by having gameplay working and everything else was secondary to this, but I would soon realize how important every aspect of a game really is.

A falling man in a hollow game

As quickly as I could, I got some basic geometry together and several pictures off google to start working on my first original game. Everything was going smoothly, falling, movement, enemies and dying were implmented pretty quickly. This is going to be done by next month I told myself as I breezed through a minimum viable product within the first week. 

The second week was spent fixing a bug where the player would phase right through the "checkpoint" platform due to having no terminal velocity, goodbye using gravity and hello using fixed downward movement. It was slower, but you're falling while contemplating life so it shouldn't mess with the mood all that much, I thought, and so I adjusted the size and speed of every other asset to make my makeshift band-aid of a solution work, and it worked. The next half of that week was spent getting the player to stop at the checkpoint and get into an akward pose ready to jump again.

This is so easy! I thought, while I planned for more enemies and hazards to add to the game, rain, wind, storms, snow and other elements were added that affected how you fell. What was supposed to be a couple of weeks turned into several months, but it was worth it, I finally started working on the art, the missing piece that would make everything come together and look like an actual game. Watch for youself!

Art was added, text was implemented, everything was slowly falling into place. But it didn't feel like a good game, it was slow, monotonous, broing, the story was confusing and disconnected from gameplay, the player dying felt unfair, progress was not rewarding, and figuring out what and why something killed you was where most of the difficulty came from, not the obstacles themselves. I had made a game just as the course I took said I should do it, so why, I wondered, did the game feel so awful?

The death of a man and birth of many islands - persistence of expectation

And so, I convinced myself it was an awful game idea, and set off to make a bigger and better game. This one was actually going to be good and would leave the falling man in the dust, I might even be able to sell it to a web games website this time! And so, apparently having learned nothing from the project I had literally just abandoned, I set off to make another, even bigger project, which went about as well as you'd expect.

I had decided early on that the falling man had felt hollow because the short story it was based on was too gloomy, but I still loved the idea of a person in the sky. I didn't realize it at the time, but I project my emotions through games, my family was going through a huge economic fallout and we were struggling to get back on our feet, and so, just as my brain was channel surfing on ideas, the controller stopped working for a split second and the channel froze on a thought, a man who lived high up in the clouds had fallen from his home and had to climb back up to where he used to be. A vertical platformer with simple art and an undefined scope, a simple concept that should be easy to execute. And just like that falling islands rose from the ashes of the falling man.

A limitless rookie

The first couple of mechanics were pretty easy to implement, jumping, movement, collisions, enemies, and all the standard stuff you could find in youtube videos I found and copied as best I could, making sure I understood what they did so I could freely add stuff as needed. In my mind I was a super person, I didn't care if I had no experience, whatever problem came my way could be solved with a little bit of google or some creative thinking. Following this line of thinking, I added a double jump, a collapsing platform and a dialogue system for flavor text.

Everything was going great! So it was time to start working on the art. Simple art started as cubes, and I soon learned a simple cube containing pixels could have a lot of personality. The more I worked on the art the further away it strayed from "simple", but I was motivated by a feeling of accomplishment and the hope of proving myself as a gamedev so it was fine. I had unlimited energy, so much in fact that achievements and character pictures in the text boxes seemed necessary, also the game needed a story now for some reason I fail to remember. So just like the falling man the falling islands were victims of a rapidly rising scope.

Cracks start to show

Collisions became a bit of a problem, a cute wall would make our main character stick to it like glue. A small rectangular trigger for ground detection soon became a circle, and two more were added on the sides of our character, and so that was fixed. Except now if you double jumped hugging a wall the wall refreshed the jump... alright, so let's make a jump counter and after 2 jumps the jump resets, problem solved! But now the character can land on the ground without using their double jump and the jump counter doesn't reset. Ok so now we add a behavior to only the bottom hitbox that resets the counter while grounded, but only to the bottom hitbox otherwise the character will be able to double jump off of the walls again.

That's how it started

Small lines and gaps started showing up in the pixel environment while moving, let's spend two weeks trying to fix that only to give up and continue as if nothing was happening. Dogs were the first enemy, so instead of wasting precious time and resources making a basic enemy prefab let's just make every other damaging objects in the game just reskinned dogs, that'll work right?

And I just kept ignoring the impending catastrophe

Alright, so this powerup boolean I have set up will turn true when the double jump boots are received, but I've added more powerups since then so I need to make a boolean for every single powerup and have them turn true depending on the power up you pick up and map them all to the next in line most convenient keyboard key because they can all be used at the same time.

Levels designed for one powerup could be completed with an earlier one

And soon, my previously limitless perception of myself was tangled in a christmas light-esque mess of code, bathed in improvised solutions-sauce and sprinkled with some poor level design parmesan. I couldn't let this game go! It was going great before, there must be some hidden, crucial line of code that's making this mess behave so weirdly. 

So I kept going

And I kept adding content

Achievements

Hidden islands

Then it was all to much

How the islands crumbled down

Soon, basic changes to the speed of dogs meant everything that damaged the player had to be tweaked, adding or changing a powerup meant making sure all the other ones still worked like they were supposed to, tweaking a level's sprites or moving the whole scene just a couple of pixels meant that the dreaded lines were back, finding one achievement out of order meant the text for the first one would show up under the name of the one you just found and all the others would be messed up... and then I finally cracked.

After much deliberation, I told myself the game could still be saved if I went to the code and organized everything. But there's a distinct lack of a completed game in this post right? Yes, the game was not saved, analyzing the code showed me everything was interconnected and the easiest solution was to scrap it and start again, but by that time I was all burnt out and had forgotten the game's original vision. What point is there in working for a game that lacks identity? 

The decision hurt. Pages on my doodle notebook wasted, hours spent on art, days on setting up animations, weeks on coding and bug fixing, months dreaming about the final product, all for nothing. The newbie  dev had learned his lesson. He was not invincible. He had limits.

A man and a thousand islands, closing thoughts

To be honest, I probably would've continue working on the game once my burnout ceased, but the ram slots of my at the time laptop decided they had had enough of me and stopped working. I lost a great deal of confidence in my skills due to this project, but in retrospect it's what's kept me grounded scope-wise ever since, with one big exception. 

For someone who had just come out of a udemy game programming course, this was an eye opener. It was my first dip into art, environment, character, level and game design. I learned to define a game's scope and rules early and take care not to get too excited when the game's taking shape. I also learned how important the connection between the game's theme, art and gameplay are, finding out you got a hollow game on your hands is terribly dissapointing. In fact, it's one of the things I take the most care to avoid today. 

Anything bigger than a small game still scares me, I always think I'm not ready or I think the game's rules and systems are too open and scare myself into not working on the ideas. I've also taken a disliking to working with pixel art in unity due to this. I constantly ask myself, what if it's not worth it at the end? what if it ends up being hollow? will I actually be able to do it?

The limitless gamedev found his limits, and years later, is scared that they're still there. 

But if I had given up, this would've been my last project, and my itch account wouldn't exist, much less my dashboard. I've almost filled my doodling notebook and I'm starting to think of which one I'm going to get when the one I'm using runs out of space. I'll keep trying, one of these days I'll actually be able to release a game I'm proud of. 

As a footnote, here's those game doodles I was talking about.