I have recently picked up working on a game that I started a couple months ago. I took a break for a few weeks over the Christmas holidays and when the New Year kicked back up, I slowly eased my way back in. Unfortunately, I left off having started building a crafting mechanic to the game. This wasn't something that I knew I would do for sure when I started the game, but now I'm starting to wish that I hadn't ever even thought of it.

The Crafting System Challenge

Now, granted, I'm about 50% done with this feature, but it's taking forever. I was hoping that I would finish this game in under a year's time and see it released either on Itch.io or the Playdate catalogue. I've gotten so much else done on this game, but now that I've tried to start building a crafting mechanic, everything has sort of ground to a halt. I just didn't anticipate how many edge cases there would be and how much work it would involve.

On one hand, I needed to learn about how to craft UIs with the Playdate SDK. Mostly this meant working with the grid UI, which is surprisingly powerful and flexible, but just took some time to learn. Beyond that, there is all kinds of plumbing and wiring that needs to be set in place just for simple things - like making sure that when one menu is open, another menu can't open, and vice versa, or making sure that you can see both crafted and un-crafted states. For example, when a player discovers a recipe to craft something, they now know that recipe, and I need to then show that state after the fact. Whereas before, it would show just a floating question mark.

The Never-ending Task List

This feature has turned out to be one of those where each time you create a new checkbox of things to do, you find that there are several sub-branching children checkboxes that need to be done. And it goes on and on. It's like opening a directory of folders only to find that you haven't reached the very bottom - there's always more folders to open and sift through. I'm glad I know this now and I didn't figure this out for a larger project, but this is something that I would have liked to have sat down and done a little bit of design documentation before attempting it. So...that's probably my biggest lesson.

Maintaining Perspective

Admittedly, I don't think this game would be as interesting without a crafting component. It's possible that I could have come up with something more unique than a crafting mechanic that would have taken less time and work to build, however. Instead, I think I defaulted to doing something that I have seen done elsewhere that is familiar to players. But sunk fallacy that it is, I'll keep going until it's done.

I am glad that I am not rushing this project just for the sake of having something done. I am still just chipping away at it day by day whenever I feel like it and I have the time. I've gone through the peaks and valleys of interest for this project; I've had lots of moments where I've thought I should just scrap the whole thing and move on, but then in the next moment, I might look at another part of the game and feel proud of it.

These days my MO is to finish things that I start. And while I might be proud of some of the individual components that make up a finished thing, what I'm most looking for and what I'm often most proud of is just finishing the thing. Starting projects is easy. Finishing them is hard.