I'm not here to advertise, the game isn't even up anymore but will be free on Steam soon. I had it on Mac App store but it didn't make sense to pay $100/year to put up a free game with... $0 revenue so I let that slide.
Here a screenshot to prove its real, but I mainly want to talk about what making it did to me mentally.
https://imgur.com/M02Nn1O
It took about 4 years, and I wandered around. I started out as a 4X Civ like game and ended up doing a casual strategy game. I got it to single player but the goal was multiplayer and I realized that to do a multiplayer game I needed to designed the foundation differently. It wasn't going to be a quick fix to make it multiplayer. I may come back and do that, but it might be easier to just start anew and copy paste the code into a new format.
It ended up being 230,000 lines of Objective C code. Yeah... that screenshot is 230,000 lines of code working. Crazy right?
It drove me insane, in hindsight.
For example, think about what it means to save and load a game. Take a game state, and save it - you have to list which things to save and write them to a file in the same order you will load them from the file. So each variable you want to save (let say for instance, gold or number of horses), you have to create a piece of code that saves it and then be sure you loaded it in the exact same order.
A recurring theme was a mistake in my save/load order and those bugs are nightmares to find and fix. You end up having to look through and just read it. The worst part was - if this bug existed YOU MIGHT NOT BE AWARE.
Lets say for instance you are saving hit points and gold. What if you mixed up gold and hitpoints in the save/load order? It wouldn't crash or throw an error. What would happen on load is the gold and hit points would be switched. Now what if you had a strategy game with 1000s of items that are saved and loaded - do you ever really know with 100% certainty that everything is exactly where it should be upon loading?
It drove me crazy, to the point that when I played games for fun I could not load from a save. I developed some sort of phobia where I was paranoid that if I loaded from a save, it wasn't the "real" game anymore. As a result, I would play games like Factorio and start a map and leave it open. If the computer crashed, I started another game. Same with every other game I played for the past few years.
I finally got over it this past year.
I also ripped out my scalp while coding and debugging. It wasn't too fun.
Anyways I'm working on another game and trying to aim for it just being fun to make and not trying to drive myself crazy. I'm making a multiplayer oriented game with the hope of getting practice before converting this past one to multiplayer.
21 Sep 2024, 9:34 pm
