Today I released my first public build of Puzzle Crossing. I started my game dev journey in the summer of 2020 (you know, the covid summer) and after two and half years, this is what I have to show for it. 

So how did it play out? And what do I mean by 2 years? Didn't the description for Puzzle Crossing say it took 5 weeks? Well, in summer 2020 I found I had some extra time since there was no more commuting to work and no taking the kids to school or any other real activity. So I decided it was a good time to finally get off my butt and start on my bucket list. One of the things on my list was making a video game. 

So while kicking back on a covid style vacation in the rockies, I pulled out my laptop and headphones and starting looking around for how to get started. I had some coding experience from earlier in my professional career and I had been dabbling with computers and code since I was in grade 1 but I hadn't really touched much code since for a lot of years. This was because I spent my days in meetings in IT management.. So I went looking for an engine that seemed beginner friendly but still offered flexibility to grow into. Eventually I came upon Godot and it looked like it was just what I was looking for. I tried out the little beginner tutorial, modified a few things and was impressed with how easy it was to get things done.

After returning from vacation I spent a few hours every week in the evenings and weekends learning more and starting my first game. By early 2021 my imagination was in full swing and I was happily creating a mess with Godot in my spare time. Then I lost my job and found I suddenly had a lot more free time. So what did I do? Well, I basically did not touch my game again for almost a year and a half! I had not been unemployed for decades, so not having a job was foreign to me and I decided I better start working on my non game dev skills because I wanted to get into the creative side of tech. 

After working on several projects and contracts, in the summer of 2022, I found I needed to take a little breather and it was then that I came across a YouTube video about the great new features coming in Godot 3.5. That got me thinking about my old project and I started to poke around my old files and play with the sprites I had created for it. Eventually that led me to going back into the editor to adjust a few things but of course I had to get everything working again with the newer version of Godot so the code was starting to draw me back in. Once I got going, I started rapidly improve and add to the old codebase. I guess the year and a half of development practice helped me with my gdscript coding too. ;)

By October I had things running pretty nicely but I knew I was a long way off from finishing the game. My scope was way too ambitious but I was OK with that. I wasn't really set on releasing anything any time soon. So then I started seeing more content about the upcoming Godot 4.0 beta and I was intrigued with some of the improvements (especially with TileMaps and TileSets) so I thought I would wait for a few beta releases and then try to migrate my game over to 4.0.. I waited till beta4 and then pulled the trigger. Big mistake!

4.0 was undoubtedly cool but it at that time there were a LOT of bugs. On top of that TIleMap handling had changed so much that I had to spend a lot of time getting my random map generators working again. And I never quite got them working the same. After 3 weeks of painful updating and troubleshooting I decided I needed a break. It was almost holiday season anyways. So I went back to working on my non-game apps.

When the New Year rolled around I found myself away from home again (visiting family in a nearby city) and while watching my son play with his cousins, I thought it would be fun to make a little game with their faces in it. I decided to make it a Match 3 game because I had been playing some lately. After a couple 2 or 3 hour sessions I had something to show them and they seemed pretty amused. At that point, I thought it would be a good exercise to see if I could make a game suitable for release in 30 days. So upon returning home, I set about the new project which I called Puzzle Crossing.

Despite all the advice from other game devs and my own experience with project around keep the scope small and tight, I kept adding and tweaking little things. When I ran up to my deadline, the game concept was mostly done but there were too many little things that I wasn't happy with. So I gave myself some more time and that brought me 8 days past my deadline. Not bad for a tech project.

Although I have now released this early version on itch.io and I hope it gives some folks some enjoyment, I am not done with it yet. One of my original goals on the release was to get some experience with the Apple and Google app stores so I will be working towards that. The game is also very short on content so I will probably add some more before releasing the mobile versions. In making the game I also had an idea to use the core of it for a hybrid strategy/rpg/puzzle game so I will likely be adding some features and mechanics to Puzzle Crossing that can be used for other variants. The main ones are having a visible and controllable avatar on the overworld map and having the map scrollable so bigger and more interesting areas can be explored.

Art and music are also some big hurdles as I am not proficient at creating either, so I will be thinking about and working on those over time too.

That was a long ramble but you are now caught up on my game dev journey. I plan follow up dev logs to be more about the game itself and some design and technical aspects.

Thanks for tuning in and I hope you enjoy Puzzle Crossing!