Plague MD is a game that my friends and I made on Godot. It is now available on mobile platforms, and will be released on steam on October 14. How this happened, I myself did not understand.
Six months ago, I was stuck in Russia due to COVID after the downsizing of the Austrian office. The training in Vienna was over, so the huge IT world of our beautiful country was waiting for me. The job market offered a career in the web, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and everything in a comfortable office, but ... Only after the end of the pandemic. It was then that my friends suggested that I make ... a game. Who will refuse this?
Plague MD is my first independent toy, although five years ago I worked part-time in a game design team, but being part of the process and becoming the only programmer are completely different things.
And here's what I remember over the last five months of my life in the following 13 points:
1. There is only one specialist - me
The engine the team chose, the library, if you like, is trendy-stylish-youthful. In the West in Europe, some studios are gradually switching to it, retraining specialists. He came to Russia recently, so the basis of the contingent of his community is schoolchildren with a rich inner world and autistic nerds. There are few smart pros, the documentation is poorly localized, and its original has an anti-obviousness, like a math teacher who suddenly skips 20 lines of the formula, because "... it's already obvious, who are you."
2. I'm stuck within the tool
Development starts with choosing a tool. If you don't take this moment, you get an obsessive desire to shove all his chips anywhere. Thousands of ideas appear that you want to execute necessarily in parallel with the current project, one hundred percent on this engine.
3. Loneliness with the code
Understanding that no one will see all the code relaxes, you start writing dirty, sometimes without thinking about future edits. Because of this, many things had to be redone 2-3 times. Rumor has it that this is a common development result (unfortunately):
4. Heavy load
Obviously, a problem arising from the previous paragraph. At some point when working with Unity, you start meeting specialists with whom you can and should consult. In addition, the topic of mentoring has not been canceled - any IT community really needs new specialists. Alas, at Godot, trained workers want a salary of more than 9,000, while others are too lazy to retrain for fear of being left out of the mainstream technology.
5. Too many bugs, too much bow
The eye gets blurry all the time, especially after a long swotting of some kind of problem such as a non-working dialogue module, when you are glad that it somehow works. From here come strange bugs like an endless number of onions that can cover the entire display space and ... complete the game. Also worth noting are those bugs that were fixed themselves. There are a lot of them, I just forgot about some of them, and then I discovered that everything had already been decided. They may still be in the game.
6. Cheat codes
Despite the fact that Godot is very convenient for testing the game and its modules, sometimes you had to stick to the gameplay for several minutes. To speed up this process, I had to go to different tricks, because classical testing methods are not suitable for such a product.
So for the testers, a combination of clicks on chickens in the game village was invented, which switched levels. But, as soon as the save module was screwed on, it began to produce a completely unusual result. This cheat code is still in the game, so you can try to activate it. Don't be surprised if Jean dies, it's all about the chicken:
7. I squeeze like a dad. Optimization
Due to the fact that the lion's share of the images was drawn by the artist and processed in highres, and also because of the designer's mad love to throw off material 5: 1, you constantly have to squeeze, making edits to the file sizes, formats (instead of wav - ogg) and using conciseness of thought in the code.
For comparison, the first version weighed 620 MB, had 4 chapters, a terrible inventory system, and a bunch of varieties of peasants, and also slowed down on weak-processor sandwiches. Current, final - 350 mb
8. Hell of archives and backups
Due to the volume of graphic materials, sound and music, the issues of saving versions and communication with colleagues immediately arose. Of course, git and clouds were immediately used. But for colleagues and internal communication, TONS of archives were used. A month later, I realized that memorizing and referring to the numerical names of versions is stupid - no one remembers. From here came crazy names like "The War of the Beavers" and "Fur Herring Coats".
9. Where do I work at all?
Because of the covid, half of the project had to be worked out remotely. There were moments when we met in the office of the agency, where my friends used to work.
The agency itself, by the way, deals with historical festivals, costumes and armor from the past are everywhere, a ton of the coolest props. Stern bearded men walk around, solve questions and support in every possible way.
The main bearded man helped us not to starve to death when it was really hard, sincerely believed in the game, kindly provided an office space for our meetings and developer accounts in Google Play and the App Store. The change in environment and work schedule helped to solve problems.
10. And you can't explain it to anyone
You sit, not bothering anyone, fixing an abstract primus stove, and then one of the bearded men drives around the corner of the office and says: “I want to play now on my iPhone, to show it”. And you start explaining that the iPhones have a closed file system, and you don't have a poppy, and here you need to set it up, and it's not 5 minutes ... The problem that hung in our communication for 2 months, until the MacBook was found. So we found a language with the outside world.
11. About the team and trust
We have a low-toxic team, everyone listens to everyone and tries to avoid direct conflicts. I don’t think it’s just out of respect - in everyday life, the get-together is toxic. This approach saves time. Shit for a long time.
12. About deadlines
It's not even the timing. If you're coding architecture, you're going to fail 100% because you'd rather be late than give out a non-working product. This crap should work stupidly. Otherwise, you're a shitty worker. The surgeon does not say that the patient was not a so-so patient if he cannot cope.
All in all, I was a little late a lot. But the game came out anyway .
13. If the game is released, it does not mean that you are free. Dobby will have many more edits
Russia will open its borders in December 2020, I will leave for Austria ... or not.