imagine you're staring at a towering brick wall the only way around is to climb it and
behind that wall is another wall in fact a long line of them and you might have a rough idea
how long this line of walls is but you don't really know for sure most likely it's two to
three times longer than you think but you're determined you have a goal and it's at the end
of these brick walls some of these walls are fun to climb maybe you've climbed ones just like this
before you're experienced but others are not fun to climb you have no idea where to start
in the process of climbing it is painful and frustrating the reward for climbing each wall
changes sometimes at the end of your climb you have something incredible to show off look at
all the progress you've made and sometimes the reward is the climb itself where you learn and
grow through the process sometimes there is little to no reward nothing to show off he didn't really
learn anything and it's a tedious and boring process well this is how I picture Game Dev or
any large project to be honest where each wall represents a task to overcome in the pursuit of
your goal I'm working on a difficult platforming game where you only control the jumping and in
this video I really wanted to share something amazing but nothing has gone to plan recently
I've been smashing my head against the most boring and frustrating brick walls so instead
I thought I'd share the reality of gamedev at least for me here's what I've been working on
this is my progress chart you might remember from previous videos but it's getting a little messy
so I've upgraded it to this digital format as you can see we're making some great progress the level
design and mechanics are basically done which means the game is essentially content complete
my next big task is the level art but before I put any level art in it's time for playtest phase 2.
so I want to test the level design of each area thoroughly because the artwork is going to sit on
top of that level design and I want to reduce the amount of iterations needed through the process
so being played test ready is my goal I broke down this goal into a series of tasks or brick
walls one I want to play a test manager script for disabling and enabling features that aren't needed
by the players two I want to implement start tracking so I can see any problem areas and
analyze people's performance three this is going to be a closed play test through Steam 4. I need
some sort of application form so the community can request access to the closed play test and five
I want to set up a new Discord chat room so I can get feedback easily in one central location these
tasks are kinda boring but it should be pretty quick so I'll easily get through them at least
that's what I thought I was flying through all of these tasks and then boom found out that I have to
rewrite my entire save system because it doesn't work but before I do that boom Another one don't
realize that I should probably put in the menu system as well so I can make sure the game data
works properly between the scenes unexpected brick walls you feel like you're close to your goal but
sometimes a brick wall can spawn in and you feel further away than you ever have been and this can
sometimes leave you in the valley of Despair the dip of Doom the whole of Sorrow though you
get the idea it's a point in any project where you're most likely to give up this is a topic
for another video but I know it can be overcome so I got to work so I update my task list and
make a basic menu system and start working on the save system uh why is the menu in the game
and everything is broken after some long hours I managed to get it working with everything loading
and saving and now I'm on a roll crazy bug if when you load in the character changes Direction
but only when you jump left uh after a couple of hours debugging I found the singular line of code
that was responsible for this let's go it works and finally we can get back to making program
so now I've somehow broken the entire pose system it just doesn't work after fixing this I got the
stat screen working now and I think it looks pretty good and when you get to the end of area
one or level 10 here it records the time you did it in and now finally we're back to where we were
before all of this all I need to do now is export Steam and we're good to go so for some reason the
buttons just stop working on export and in days later I found that apparently my custom jump tool
is breaking the game I I have no idea why this happens but if I delete it at least it works
and now I'm just getting random lag spikes when I play I initially thought it's because
my whole game is in one scene so I spent days figuring out a system to break it all up but it
turns out if you check this button in Project sentence uh no more like magic It's Magic and
all of this has taken weeks and I need to make a video to share my progress but this is all I've
got well this is the reality of gamedev which can sometimes be painful frustrating and boring
foreign but eventually I got through it and started play testing and people were having
fun putting hours into the game falling endlessly and sharing their best times and I realized that
while Game Dev might suck sometimes it's worth it and throughout this difficulty I was never
alone there is a whole community of like-minded people who can help and are on the same Journey
working tirelessly on projects and are fiercely passionate about problem solving and creativity
these Journeys are shared and when you're done whether one person or thousands of people play
your game you will have created a completely unique interactive experience out of thin
air like a fun Wizard and if you ask me that's pretty special keep climbing those brick walls