It’s taken a long time to get to this point, but it feels like Ragelaw is finally moving in the right direction. Still far from completed, but the journey to this point has been a struggle (as mentioned in previous posts).
The challenge for me has always been creating this open-world game while I never really enjoy playing open-world games! I like my games to have a clear path and end-goal, mostly because I don’t have a lot of time to play games. So when the time is there to play, it’s a lot easier for me to be guided through the paces and see everything a game has to offer based on a set path.
Open-world games do have a set path, but there is a lot of room for just finding your own “fun” in the game. Setting aside the complaints I have with that as a gamer, it’s even more difficult to wrap my game-designer brain around it.
All these months I’ve been adding a bunch of interesting game-mechanics that I thought would work and would fit in an open-world game. The problem was that for most of the development time, it felt like a lot of interesting game-mechanics..glue’d together.
Luckily the tweaking and changing of things moved all these mechanics closer to a single game, and the last few weeks it really feels like I got a game going. Yay!
The main problem I have right now is that an open-world needs a lot of content to stay interesting, and since we are already nearing November, the nerves are now kicking in a bit because 2017 and my target of January/February is extremely close.
So I’ll be doing a lot of content creation and adding it all to the game. The trick will be to mix and match a lot of existing game objects and mechanics to create new interesting missions and settings.
I do feel relieved that things are finally moving in the right direction. I had a lot of days where working on the game simply was no fun and a hurdle I had to take.. but now I constantly have new ideas and enjoy working on it again, which does wonders for the creativity and progress.
It might not be January or February, but this game is coming !!
