Gamedev Problems: Introduction

So, I'm a hobbyist indie game developer. For me, that means that I mostly make games under the time constraints of a game jam, because long term game dev projects tend to take too much cumulative energy for me to do over time.

The upshot of this is that the way I write games tends to be very BASIC-brained when I'm -in- the heat of things (though having Godot as a game creation tool helps offset that somewhat, since it give my code-brain breaks to work on scene composition), and then in the aftermath, I do some reflection to try to see what abstractions or approaches I could use to solve a given problem with less hassle next time.

To give a very basic and small example: My first jam game, Omega Llama, is almost entirely in one 380-line Lua file, with some support libraries. I -barely- knew how to split up Love2D/Lua programs into multiple files at the time.

My next jam game involved a -lot- more splitting of the code for things like enemies or status effects into their own files, I found that it made it easier for me to do things like edit two systems side by side.

This is a super basic, and not -super- gamey example, but it's an example of the sort of lesson that came out of me working on game jams.

And some problems I've solved to what I think is an acceptable tedium vs intricacy tradeoff, and some I haven't. I can make bullets go nyoom in Godot quite easily, and I've done a -lot- of fun grid-based things in Godot as well. In the meantime, Roguelikes of any stripe continue to be a large hassle for me in Godot.

So, in the rest of this series, I plan on explaining the solutions I've come to, and the open problems that still give me brain itchies.