i'm working on then;again again
ok well let me be fair to myself i had been working on it in the planning sort of way but not in the "there is a game engine editor open on my computer currently" sort of way. but yeah i'm doing the game engine editor open on my computer type of working on the game again, and it feels nice.
not gonna lie though, a big part of why i had stopped working on my game is because i was like deeply unhappy with its state, and i kind of could feel that happening even before i finished school. the thing about working on a game as part of school is that, at the end of the day, the creative process is essentially forced into becoming the least important part of the whole endeavour.
really by the half-way point of the term, it wasn't about creating a game that i would like or be proud of, it was about getting the committee of old white dudes to say "yeah, this guy can graduate i guess." it doesn't matter if my game is beautiful or connects, it matters if my project checks the boxes that say i can make a video game in the most sterile sense.
i think basically everyone in my class felt this by the end. we weren't adding things to our game that would make it fun, or adding flourishes that would make it just a little bit more stylish - we were doing things that would get the project over with already.
not to be a complete loser, but i did think about penguindrum a lot during my degree because of the child broiler, which sounds completely fucking insane without the context, which i will now give, which is also spoilers but it's also so insane that it doesn't necessarily matter, but also the show is old so i'm allowed to spoil it i guess: the child broiler is a place where children go to be "made invisible".
there's a lot of interpretations for this, but given how utilitarian capitalism is a theme in both penguindrum and the creator's previous work utena, i'd argue that the point of the child broiler is to be basically a metaphor for school or society as a whole, in a sense; you are molded into fitting the definitions of "valuable" until you're just the same as everyone else - invisible in the sense that you are no more noticeable than anyone else.
my whole post-secondary experience was, much like most of my cohorts, pretty much awful. there seems to be this sort of strange cult-like phenomenon associated with the school which i graduated from, which was that "you won't have time to see your friends or family or do your hobbies really, but it'll be worth it".
in all discussion i've seen directed at new students or people interested in the school online, it's basically come down to "you should suck it up". but why? when the school is booked for months in advance for counselling appointments, when students are constantly on the verge of breaking down, when drop out rates are practically 50/50, is "suck it up" really good advice? is it even helpful?
when i was working on my game, i sucked it up. i had already spent a crazy amount on tuition, so i was going to finish to get the piece of paper. but did i actually create art? did i make something i'm proud of? can i honestly, really say that school itself - the classes i took and the work that i did - made me a better person? a more complete person?
for the record, i don't think that what i handed in at the end of my school year was art. for those other questions, i would say that it did make me a better and more complete person if i was talking to an employer.
all of this is to say, don't do game dev in school. do it on your own time. watch youtube videos or read textbooks about game design; that's what your profs will have you do anyway so you might as well save yourself a cool several thousand dollars. fill a notion with all your ideas. make a game design doc and mockups and concept art and do paper tests.
i'm working on my game again, and i'm not working on it as part of school. i'm working on it in my own time for myself, and i have as much time as i want for doing the little things that i want to do. i'm switching to unity because unreal engine is 100gb on my computer. i'm going to make the dodge animation more interesting looking. i'm going to make new sprites for callisto. i'm going to add little flourishes into the visual novel.
i'm going to do a lot of little things that are fun for me, and i'm going to make a game.