Roshambo: Serious Business
After lamenting about my inability to finish projects but prior to identifying the actual issue I was facing, I theorized that perhaps my problem was just not having enough constraints. To test this, I decided to make a game styled like a game jam1Primarily due to lacking the confidence and wanting to avoid the pressure of joining an actual game jam.: 24 hour time limit with a specific art pack. This would force my scope to stay small. I found this wonderful art pack by Pixel_Poem, fired up Godot, and in a couple short hours had put a simple little scene together.
A simple spooky scene
There was still a pretty major problem I was facing though: I had no idea what I was making. I was just throwing things together hoping something would stick. It was a slow process, and with every hour that ticked by I grew more and more discouraged. Like most of my previous projects, this led me to a place where I was frustrated, had no idea what to do next, and was just completely unmotivated to continue working2Interestingly, it seems having either too much scope or not enough scope results in me ending up in the same place..
Searching around for videos or articles about how other devs start new games, I came across HeartBeast’s video and while it didn’t provide the answer I was looking for, it did give me new insight into the problem I actually had. With that, I changed my approach. Rather than picking a genre (“I want to make a dungeon crawler”) and then trying to massage all other details together to result in something I could enjoy, I tried going in the opposite direction: picking a mechanic and letting everything else revolve around that.
I wanted something simple, something that I knew couldn’t have a scope that would explode out of proportion. I also wanted something that I hadn’t really seen used very often. A few options occurred to me: Tic-tac-toe, some kind of word game, Lights-Out; none of these really intrigued me though. Then Rock Paper Scissors popped into my mind. It’s trivial to implement and I had only ever seen a single game use it as a primary game mechanic.
I briefly looked into how difficult it would be to make an AI more competent than just picking one of the three actions at random and happened across a very in-depth article. The descriptions in this article of the history, strategies, and meta game conjured a picture of tournaments in which RPS is Serious Business. This made me draw comparisons to the Pokémon Trading Card Game on Game Boy. Suddenly the clouds parted, the fog cleared, and I had a crystal clear vision of the game I wanted to make!
Over the next seven days I would work on realizing the vision I had3My previous plan of a 24-hour restriction was entirely forgotten and I’ve started expanding beyond the original art pack, but in terms of design and scope I’m still treating this like a game jam project.. It all came so effortlessly. I knew exactly what features I wanted and how to break them down into workable tasks. That’s not to say I didn’t have to experiment, try different approaches, and choose which results I liked better, or that I didn’t run into various bugs that proved difficult to resolve. I certainly did, but throughout that process I had a guiding star that ensured I would never lose my way or get overwhelmed, and that the scope would continue to stay extremely small. A bit of sanding and couple coats of paint later and Roshambo Adventure was born!
The adventure begins…
Within the next few days I plan on putting together a proper devlog video over on my YouTube channel showing off what I’ve built so far and what I’m planning on working on next. Keep an eye out for that! I will also be making another post here in the near future talking about my time management strategy. I’ve traditionally been extremely terrible at time management on my projects, so for this I came up with a new plan that I’ve been enacting over the past couple weeks. I’m super happy with how that has been progressing and look forward to telling you all about it!
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