The Addiction of Huffing Polish
As I slog away at this project, I find that I'm constantly being distracted by the sweet allure of polish. No, not Polish as in the people. Polish as it the lemon fresh chemical scent sometimes used to clean. I apologize to the people of Poland for the English. The language not the... oh boy.
Anyways, what I mean is that as I make this game I find that the things I really like are the primary gameplay elements and the little things here and there. The little couple of pixels that give each element character and make it so it feels so much more full and alive. However, this is problematic as it violates The Order of Programming which goes:
Basically in any kind of project making all the components and gameplay work is paramount. There is no sense in making a lot of assets and stuff without knowing exactly how they will be used, otherwise you might encounter something that just doesn't work.
Scorekeeper/Speedometer - The first panel that allows for automation.
In the case of the Scorekeeper, certain actions give you "score" which doesn't have any gameplay effect but does increase a value. When it reaches a certain digit, it triggers whatever it is connected to. I got it working, and I made it pretty, but I skipped the "Make it good" part. The result? The 4th hole triggers way too much and it seems like too many digits. Which means I have to redo parts of the background image. This is what I mean.
At the same time, there is a neccessity to make some thing pretty and make them pop when you're working on any type of project. It's the stuff that gets you excited, where you can step back and say "Wow, that looks good!" Otherwise, it's very difficult to feel excited by just a bunch of blank boxes. Recently I updated the wires between the patch cables so they move around, it still needs work but look at this thing:
An insane for-loop creating Pinjoint2Ds. I want to have it rotate the coiled sprite but that seems too difficult. A draw_polygon is being used to fill the gaps with minimal effort. Need to fix gap and lag.
When I added these wires, suddenly the people who looked over the project took notice. "Wow, you've done a lot!" but the thing was most of the changes were under the hood. Just showing that wire was enough to renew myself and others. The wires still aren't "pretty" but I can iterate to get them perfect. It's that polish (the cleaning method) that keeps me going, and keeps any project feeling alive. However, the dread of the secondary gameplay loop is always rearing it's ugly head. Having beautiful connecting panels is fine, but the player must be sure it feels good. It has to serve the overall game. The polish feels good, but I need to focus on the stage design, which still feels lacking.
I want to make it pretty, but first it must work, not just programmatically but from a gameplay perspective.