This should be the part of the blog where I say: ‘OMG! NANA IS OUT! BUY NOW!!!’. Yes, I should be doing just that, but I won’t; well, not just yet. First I want to log my progress while having my hands deep in the guts of Nana’s Pettin’ Emporium. Previously, in Blogging with Cake n Iron, our fair writer expressed her plans for the initial Nana Vertical Slice; art style, marking meanderings and general puppy gifs to get her point across. Said vertical slice had bugs, but no show stoppers and game play proved to be simplistic and easy to digest.
Yay, you awesome developer you! Pat yourself on the back for building a solid build!
Whoawhoawhoawhoa, Hoss. You didn’t finish Nana, just her skeleton. Let’s talk about your ups and downs while running pass the Alpha finish line!
Yeah, let’s talk about that, ‘Hoss’. I am at a loss for words because, hey, I’m not that smart. Smart, as I define it, is talking a bunch of code protocol gobbledygook that a lot of tech people do to show off that cerebral penis of theirs. I should talk about ray casting, procedural map generation and all that, but that’s a waste of time. For coders reading this, I am not smart; what I am, though, is persistent. Persistent enough to write a post mortem about what I did right and wrong to get to this point and how said post mortem will direct future deliverables and milestone reflection. Maybe a new developer will learn from my missteps or a seasoned developer will offer feedback. Either way, I am pleased with my current progress.
Concept | What I did right:
Was Not in A Creative Bubble: When I first started Nana, I didn’t go to my work machine at all. I took note to a lot of boargame developers around me and went the old fashion route: Pen and Paper. I drew out Nana’s general game play and started to spit ball before I touched a keyboard. I talked it over with a few friends who are close enough to give brutal feedback and ask difficult questions to see if the idea had legs before I invested hours into building it.
Wrote A Single Page GDD Summary: After I saw excitement and inquisitiveness from my feedback, I got down to work with the paper work. Hold on! I did say paper work but not a lot of paperwork. I wrote about basic functionality, expected end results of game play, ideas about user base, scoring rewards and user interface flow from beginning to end. These subjects only took two or three loose paragraphs on a single typed page. I scanned in my spitball sketches and logged both articles as a ‘Starter GDD’ that I could come back to as I build and wrote a more refined GDD.
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