Sunday Show Out - 03/15/2026
Let’s just forget about the unannounced, unplanned week off posting I just took.
Oh, you’re not going to forget about it. Fine.
Life, as always, is a pot of simmering water, ever threatening to bubble over force us to react. The myriad of bubbles in this case took the term of midterms and submitting midterm grades. That severely cut into my morning gamedev time and left me with two options:
- keep my regular posting schedule and scale back work on the Beatdown in the Holler prototype; or
- keep working on the prototype and forego posting.
I’m an amateur game developer, not an amateur poster, so the choice was obvious. I do apologize for the unannounced hiatus: I could have fired off a short post letting everyone know what was up (I mean, I’m not going to blame anyone for not subscribing so they’d immediately get updates even if the schedule changes, although you could totally subscribe, it’s super-easy, why haven’t you subscribed yet) and I will do so in the future. In short, mea culpa.
“Well,” you say, carefully weighing whether to forgive me outright or demand accountability, “you do have progress to show for it, right?”
Good job going with the accountability. It keeps me honest. As for progress, this is the last day of an extended weekend, and I made the most out of that time. So…
What did I do?
All I really wanted to do was finally, finally finish Zel’s sprite sheet. A good friend reminded me that, instead of spending time making it good, I needed to instead just make it. The May 4th release is a prototype, and I needed to start acting like it instead of applying any sort of polish to it. I banged out the last few animation cycles and, when it was all done, had the following animations in the four cardinal directions:
- idle
- walk
- run
- reelshot
- kick
- stab
I imported that sprite sheet into Aseprite and changed over the idle, walk, kick, and reelshot sprites to the new sprite sheet. I planned on stopping there. I could have stopped there: I was making great progress on the prototype, and a May 4th release date was looking more probable.
I could have stopped there.
I would have stopped there.
I just wanted to do one more thing.
I had run and stab animations, but I didn’t actually have, you know, run and stab mechanics in Zel’s finite state machine (FSM). I figured the run would be easy, and it was. It took about a half-hour of work, but Zel finally had a “B-button run” and broke into an appropriately-animated sprint.
This small task was just an appetizer, as I was now ravenous to do more. I already had a kick mechanic, it seemed easy enough to add a new, “stab” state to Zel’s FSM that was similarly-coded that dealt twice the damage. And it was pretty easy! Zel could now walk, run, use the reelshot, kick, and stab. Zel was finally, surprisingly, prototype complete.
I looked at my prototype to-do list. Maybe I could knock out a little more this weekend?
The only big tasks that remained were to make prototype sprites for the three enemy types (melee, ranged, and flying), and create a simplified, color de-saturated tileset. An hour later, those were done.
I sat at my desk for a moment and realized something.
I had all the pieces for the prototype now. I just needed to assemble those pieces.
Holy muffins.
What did I learn?
I don’t know that I learned any new hard skills during the last two weeks. I used skills I’d already learned, and there’s something to be said for learning through practice, but I didn’t add to my game development bag of tricks.
I learned huge lessons about myself, though:
I can do this.
I can make a game.
I can release a prototype on time.
Those aren’t small things to learn about yourself. I needed that confidence boost, that reassurance that I could make a game.
When I started this journey, I thought I could be a game developer.
Now, I know that I’ve always been one.
That’s pretty cool!
What’s next?
This week, I’m putting those aforementioned pieces together. I’m crafting a smaller, looping world, populating it with geography and respawning enemies, and then playtesting the heck out of it. I’m also recruiting playtesters (more on that this week). Things are coming together faster than I’d thought possible, so I have to do what I do best put one foot in front of the other and just get this thing done.
Come back tomorrow to see what those next steps are. As always, thanks for reading!
