Today I added a new project to my itch.io page containing a demo release of a game I call "Hot Spud". I started to make this game so very long ago. It was actually the project that taught me I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did about programming a game. This all started in September 2020...

I genuinely enjoy playing a well made brick breaking game, but the keyword there is well made. The game "Shatter" comes to mind as one of the most recent ones I've found, and I also enjoyed the spin on the genre that is "Wizorb". There are probably hundreds of lifeless brick breaking games out there though (and probably some other good ones I haven't seen.)

So, Hot Spud for me was originally a project simply called "bricks" and I hoped to both learn Godot Engine, and build this brick breaking game. The learning curve for Godot was not too bad, but I quickly learned that I had no idea how to organize game code. The code quickly got out of control and became something I couldn't work with.

To make matters worse, at one point I overwrote a week of progress with a backup by accident and that really put a halt to working on this project. Thankfully though, I worked on several other projects after semi-abandoning this one, and the practice that brought me gave me the ability to fix the mess I had made.

Sometime in February 2022 I decided I wanted a refactoring challenge, and I chose this game to be that project. Between February 22 and April 6 there were 385 changed files with 16,511 additions and 1,948 deletions over 65 commits! Some of that is the generated scene files but it's still a lot of stuff. Practically an entire rewrite honestly.

The best part about this is how easy the game is to work with now from a development perspective. Adding stages, powerups, obstacles, or even an entire new adventure is straightforward now and all the game objects operate independently. Untangling things was actually kind of fun!

However, I am not sure what the end goal is for this game since I approached it with such a heavy emphasis on refactoring. So that's why I decided to post the game on itch today for anyone and everyone to check out. I would love to hear your feedback about the game through itch comments, or on Twitter, if you have time to play. Thanks for reading!

Play Hot Spud on itch

Follow me on Twitter

Nearly 6 months after my first post on this domain I have spent a lot of time working on various projects, and absolutely no time writing about them! This is usually the point where I deter myself from pressing forward, but I'm not going to do that this time around. I did however join Twitter in the meantime if you're looking for someone new to follow today.

I spent most of my time in the last six months working in Godot Engine to build "Farmhand Go!". This was an excellent learning experience for how Godot works, though of course I wish I had known everything I know now before I started that project. The most difficult to learn part was how to make the game responsive for various resolutions. Interface building for a game felt much more complicated than it does for a website. Audio work is no joke either! Finding sound effects is a really challenging, and time consuming, task.

This game started with a very simple idea from Jeremy Kahn after we started talking about building a mobile game that took place in the Farmhand universe. We purposely started with the smallest idea we could possibly think of, and a weekend gamejam approach to building a prototype.

I think the first pitch was something like tap plots to water crops, harvest them to earn money, and fend off crows in the process. We had no sound, and the most minimal art, but the prototype was actually kinda fun after just a few hours of work. We felt that if this could be fun and slightly addicting while the game had cheap graphics and no audio at all then it should be pretty great once it was polished!

I feel obliged to say that I knew making a game was a lot more work than it seems like it's going to be so keeping scope as small as possible (and even smaller) was key to building this game, but this was still more work than I thought it would be! Honestly, building the core game loop was easy compared to making the game feel "full". Adding scenery, particle effects, audio, and motion, are all very subjective and very critical.

Making the game look good was actually something I didn't think I would be able to do at all without finding a teammate that was an artist, or hiring someone to draw some custom assets. However, I found that the assets on itch and OpenGameArt were actually way higher quality than I was expecting. Purchasing some crops, and some scenery (and then learning how to use the Godot tile editor) was what made the game stop looking like a prototype and start feeling like a 'real' game. Of course, if it was boring to play before it was still going to be boring, but having nice assets made it so much more enjoyable to show the game to other people.

Sometime towards the end of "Farmhand Go!" I felt very empowered with my Godot skills and set out to build some prototypes of other ideas I have. Now that "Farmhand Go!" has been off my plate for a little bit I have been thinking a lot about what to do with these prototypes. I also have some web projects in mind. So, I have some indecision to deal with for now and might jump between some things for a bit.

Play Farmhand Go! for free on itch.

Follow me (@onehumblepot) on the Twitter.

Being an indie game developer is a notoriously hard job to make money doing. Most people doing it are doing it as their second (or maybe third) job, and never making more than a cup of coffee worth of money. Why is that?

Well, in short, I think it’s because games are ridiculously hard to build, there are tons of them out there to compete against, and nobody wants to pay for them at the end of the day anyways. Even $60 for a AAA title game is a steal when you consider the hundreds of thousands (or more) of man hours it took to build. A simple Minesweeper clone would probably take over a hundred hours to truly complete to the point of releasing.

So, being an indie dev you already have to set your scope low (if you plan to finish), your price tag even lower, and be prepared to do a lot of work. Then you have to market a lot! That’s actually one of the most difficult, and costly parts of the whole thing.

This blog is about my personal journey as a hobbyist indie game dev. I work full time, 5 days a week, as a software engineer and work on personal development efforts before, and after that job. This blog will contain posts of various types about the things I spend my free time working on. Hopefully we all learn something interesting on the journey! That’s what it’s all about after all, right?

Current focus: Farmhand Go! A mobile game currently in the prototyping stage that takes place in the Farmhand universe.