Everyone is Happy

So, I completely fell into the trap of feature creep. This is particularly annoying because I KNEW it was a risk and first games should be kept simple. Despite this, I ended up spending so much time trying to figure out and implement new features that I wasn't actually progressing.

So I have had a good talking to myself, reminded myself that this is my first attempt and "This would be great" doesn't necessarily mean "I should add it". I've also told myself to just relax about using the character generator, it's fine. It's not a commercial game, and trying to design art was detracting from actually working on what is important, the story.

(I totally understand that the community likes custom art. But I need to decide where to focus my time. I may or may not go with a pixellated effect for the characters later, depending, but I am going to stop letting it distract me from this.)

I also have to stop wasting time trying to get the mapping perfect. It's a dialogue based game, that and the storytelling are more important.

In a way, it was easier when I assumed no one would ever play this but my wife. :D I got caught in the trap of wanting to please people too much, because I was so touched and pleased (and still am!) that people showed interest. I just have to be realistic about, while I want this to be as good as I can possibly make it, I'm a newbie and it's always going to be a learning experience.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is, once I'd decided to drop all the "they would be awesome" features and strip it down to the basics (storytelling), I suddenly started making progress again! I got more down in two hours yesterday than I have in ages. :D And it's fun again.

My current goal is to get the first act playable as a beta demo ASAP. All the variables for later in the game may not necessarily be in place, as I need to play with weighting, but the first stage of storytelling should be there ASAP.

The only thing I want to mention is that my little nine year old cousin told me he wants to be a game developer when he grows up, so I got him RPGMaker in the Humble bundle. :D He has been working on a Game Maker Pacman clone for the last year.

Also, I'm continuing to learn to code, if not for this project, for later, because it's fun.