This post is a follow up to my four earlier game making posts: Mindfulness Mansion - awakening the game maker in me and the mindful being in you, Mindfulness Mansion 1 - A Walk through Video of my Possibly Deleted Game, Keep Smiling - An Update on my Mini Games on Mindfulness and How To Talk with Your Parents - My Latest Mini Game
My focus was elsewhere lately, due to traveling back to Portugal but I'm settled in again in the beautiful Monte Frio and am slowly but steadily finding the peace of mind to create again and focus on game making once more.
Do you know this feeling of being so excited about something that you start without any research or preparation? This is what I felt with this game making program called Bitsy. It didn't help that my brother - who is a game making pro - told me that he expected me to make my first game in an hour ( or two ). That only made me more impatient.
After playing around with this tool for a couple of days and then - after a break of over a week - trying to get back into it, I realized that I just don't understand this well enough to make and finish games. I keep falling into the same trap, which is as follows:
I seem to overwrite the previous versions of my games all the time, loosing part of the game ( design ) in the process. And more importantly, I don't really know what I'm doing wrong. Whether it's a browser issue ( perhaps I shouldn't use the Brave browser for this? ), the way I save my games or something completely different.
It was time for...
a much needed ( mindful ) reset
Now let's talk a little bit about the downside to improv
Besides all the aforementioned, as a creative ( and as a person in general ) I have this tendency to just start doing things without a plan. Sometimes this works out. There's situations, though, where you need to tell yourself to slow down. To stop what you're doing, take a break, make a plan and then get back to whatever you were working on before ( or not ).
It seems like I reached that point.
In this case, I will need to learn more about Bitsy, to play other people's games ( made with this tool ), to ask question in the bitsy Discord - which I joined today - and so on and so forth.
No matter how much I would like to share ( parts ) of my games with you, this will need to wait for a bit. As I can't promise - at this point in time - that whatever I share with you will not be deleted / overwritten or cast aside in the near future :>)
I kindly ask you for your patience, so I can learn more about ( this ) game making ( tool ) first...
P.S. I couldn't help myself and decided to add a GIF above this writing that shows you the start of what was supposed to be a level in my first game, Mindfulness Mansion. I would call it: 'The Flower Garden'
P.P.S. And then, as I what about to focus on learning about game making and freezing the actual game making itself, my attention was caught by the following:
It starts tomorrow and I couldn't resist myself to join in on the jam:
Let's see if I can find the time to actually partake in this, as well as acquire the knowledge to make something decent.
TO BE CONTINUED...