Blog 1: Hello World!

2/28/2023

Hello to all who find this webpage. This is the first of hopefully many blogs for my game Integration Hell. The concept is a fresh, never seen before game; a automation heavy resource management game. While making a game like this is nothing completely original, I want to try to make one. I have been thinking about this one for a while and I think that writing blogs and having a website will motivate me to pull the game from my head into the real world. I would like to write these weekly, but as a college student I may get too busy to write one weekly.

Enough introduction, there is a game to talk about. As with many games in this genre, it is mathematics disguised as a video game. Not anything too crazy though, just mostly rates. In this blog I would like to write down some goals that I want to achieve for Integration Hell and then break the goals down into manageable tasks. I will put this down at the bottom of each blog and completed tasks will be removed from the list in the following blog. For now, the two big components to glue together are fundamental game logic and graphics for a window.

Gameplay - I'm imagining the gameplay as a 2D top down game (3D hard) where they are in a mostly empty world. Gathering at the start is simple, available resources at the start will be things like rocks, wood, metal. But, as the game advances, resources like metal get broken down into different types of metals to make more complicated technology.

Software Architecture - It's very easy to start making a game like this and then have the code turn into an absolute mess I.e. spaghetti code. I want to avoid this from the start so that tweaking the game further in development does not break random things.

Bugs/Unintended Features - When it comes to bugs, I'll try to swiftly remove them from the game. However, my definition of a bug may be different that other people so here it is. If there is an unintended feature that makes the game unplayable or ruins it, then it is a bug I'm going to fix. If something in my game has unexpected behaviors that the community likes, I will not remove said feature since it is not a gamebreaking bug. However, I do not make any guarantee that some really specific unexpected feature will not get broken in future updates.

Why make a game development blog where you have not even touched an IDE yet? While I have not made any real progress besides writing a few paragraphs, I want to have documentation from the very start for two reasons. One is that by having written down things I'm thinking about, I can manage development better. Two, it will be fun to have snapshots of the progress I made somewhere, rather than a finished/unfinished project.

That is all for now, I have some work to do getting rudimentary code and concepts written down.

The Checklist:

Goals:

𐄂 Window/Graphics

𐄂 Game Rules/Gameplay

𐄂 Game Logic

Tasks:

𐄂 Get a window to open

𐄂 Put an image on the window

𐄂 Move the image with the keyboard

𐄂 Define the world

𐄂 Have the program make the world

P.S. the boxes on the checklist are not broken, I wanted empty box ascii characters there. Until next time.