026-making games is hard

written: 24th August 2026

Making games can be really cool and fun, but i feel like often it gets boring around the start and end, because i dont feel like im making progress. maybe its because my workflow is bad, but at the start it usually takes a while of doing boring stuff you've done so many times (like player movement) and at the end you need to make content (like levels) and spend time polishing to make it a nice experience.

the first one could be solved by making some premade components or something, which would be smart. also i feel like gameplay code is usually pretty boring cuz its often pretty simple but kind of unique i guess, and the second one is kind of a thing you just have to go through i guess.

games i had the most fun making recently were games where it was actually fun adding stuff. which is pretty obvious lol but ill talk about my 2 favorite games to make

spaces of spaces

i feel like game i had more fun doing came out of tech demoes. spaces of spaces was just made out of me following a raycasting tutorial, with no real plan to make anything out of it but then i was like "hey this is a pretty cool aesthetic actually!" and just built more and more on it.

the other part of this is that adding stuff to the game was really simple, since (most) of the game data lived inside tiled (a map editor). so to add an npc, i would just create an object in the map editor, and it would apear in the game immediately. i guess a good editing workflow is pretty important but often im too lazy to make the tools since it feels like to much of an effort.

penguin game

another tech demo that turned into a game :D basically i randomly came up with an idea for the snow simulation, made it, and found it so satisfying to run around in that i made it into a game lol. then i spent a bunch time making the player and trees, which was also really fun because i could experiment stuff and see the result pretty fast. it was also fun because they arent actually 3d! its just 2d shapes drawn on top of each other and offset with math.

the start was really fun, but after it became tedious because of a lack of tools and i got a little tired of writing lol.

conclusion

i need to make more tools for making games i guess. also u should make games cuz games r KEWL

idk i could elaborate/edit more but fuck perfectionism. and doing that is booooring