Week 21 - ARPG Updates (Video!)

Decided to wrap together some updates on where I'm at with the ARPG and some decisions I'm making on it going forward into a short video. This way helping to keep the YouTube viewers as up to date as the people here. I'll be putting it out to subscribers on Friday in time with my regular livestream.

In summary: I've been struggling a bit with over-engineering the structure of the ARPG and not getting code done for wanting to get it done as "correctly" as possible.

I've spoken before about trying to find a balance for tutorials on stuff that is scalable, efficient, readable and optimized and stuff that is digestable and presents well.

This has worked for smaller pieces, but for a series like this has proved to be prohibitively slowing. It should have been unsurprising that the practices that can stop a game from shipping, can have the same impact on a tutorial series.

But I still want to bring better coding habits to the GM userbase. So what I've decided to do is initially lean more in the direction of simple, "make it work" solutions (similar to the Platformer in many ways). When the series is "complete", I want to then follow it up with some videos on refactoring and restructuring elements of the game for better scalability.

I think this falls more in line with how game development... actually works, when it does work. And also allows me to have the best of both worlds: Bringing you into the project with digestible, beginner friendly concepts and then showing you how to rebuild those elements in better ways. Giving me a dedicated space in which to show the hows and whys of certain methodologies and paradigms.

Aside from that stuff, I'm also pouring work into PokeyPoke as a new build needs to be ready for next week and Norwich Gaming Festival.

$20 supporters will also get to play around with the build after the festival! 

Cheers to all of you for your continued patience and support, as always.

-S