I’ve been spending a lot of the last week trying to figure out if I really want to be working on this game and, if so, how I want to go about working on it. I’m trying to sort out whether my yearning to go back to EverEnding is because of a deep-rooted passion for that project or because I needed something distant to strive for. What if EverEnding is taking so long because I’m scared of having to confront it being done sooner? What if my perfectionism is just a way to suspend a work in progress indefinitely, keep it forever young and unrealized, so that I have a shape of future to look forward to?
Fortunately, these aren’t questions that demand immediate answers, though it’s important that I be thinking about them. Also fortunately, working on this project has been a great opportunity to quickly go through the EverEnding code base and pull out anything that might be useful in the way of general purpose code, all of which I put in a shared classpath directory for use in these and any future projects I may need them in. I’m not sure if anyone might find this code useful, since there are a number of very nice frameworks for a lot of this stuff out there, but I may try to tidy some of these up and release them sometime. Regardless, I feel like any time I’m working on code shared between the projects I’m getting twice the bang for my buck. There’s certainly something to be said for that.
Anyway, as to the specific status of the project, I have pretty much all the gameplay stuff complete, and I just need to handle transitions between levels and stuff like that now. Though I’d originally planned on designing the levels immediately after getting the gameplay working (and had planned on getting started on that a week earlier as well, heh), I think I’m actually going to get the visuals in place next, because honestly playing the game with placeholder graphics for the pieces would either be confusing, if they’re really basic, or a lot of redundant work if they’re not. It shouldn’t be too hard to get a decent looking set of pieces and some alright menu graphics, so I should just get that done so I know what I’m dealing with.
It feels right now like there’s a lot of change in the air. I may end up changing the way I approach, well, a lot of things… but I still think this game is worth making, so I’ll keep pressing forward on it, even if not quite at the pace I’d originally intended. I think, though, that I’m probably going to also pick EverEnding back up before this is finishes, instead of trying to do this one all at once and then get back to it – maybe I’ll work on them alternating days or something, dunno. As I said, still figuring things out.
It’s starting to feel like an adventure again.