About 8 months ago, I started building my second game for the Playdate. The working title was "Black Hole" (later to be renamed "Radio Silence") and the idea was simple: you are a crew member in a spaceship that needs to enter a black hole. And so you orbit around the black hole, collecting raw materials from space debris, which you then use to craft items to help you successfully enter and cross through a black hole without getting crushed (Yes, I know that it's physically impossible to go through a black hole, but this is also a fictional game).

When I started this game, I was coming off the momentum of having finished my first game for the Playdate, which was a success beyond my expectations (people actually paid for it!). I was determined to keep up that momentum.

This time around I wanted to build something different. Whereas my first game used the Pulp game engine on the web, I now wanted to use Lua and to build something that was conceptually simpler—less of a story, and more of an arcade game.

In the end, I lost steam on this project and have decided to let it go. But first, let me walk you through how far I got and some of the things I learned.

The Game Concept: Orbiting a Black Hole

As I mentioned, it's an arcade-style game and conceptually has a pretty simple story. The core loop is to collect materials, craft upgrades, and then to descend safely into the black hole. There were a few areas that I could embellish to make it more than this simple game loop, but at the end of the day, there wasn't much more to it than that.

I'll walk you through the few main core mechanics that I had to build, show you some screenshots, and share what I enjoyed and disliked about that process.

Orbiting

I began by creating a very simple mechanic, the ability for the ship to orbit a black hole and slowly descend into it. I spent maybe a week and a half on this, and it wasn't too complicated. I had to learn a little bit of math and got some help from GPT. In the end, I had a sprite that rotated around another sprite, the first of which would slowly move towards the second. Again, it was a matter of adding collision detection between the two so that when the ship touched the black hole, it would disappear, and the game would be over.

But this alone was kind of boring. I needed to introduce some kind of mechanic that would keep the player paying attention, and I also wanted to find some way of using the crank. And so I built a strange little UI that was meant to represent the navigation of the ship to stay in balance with the black hole's orbit. The idea was that as you would rotate the crank, you needed to keep a special nav point in between two closing-in meters. It would get progressively harder as the game moved on, and using the crank, you would have to gently navigate this balance.

Eventually, I had something in place so that when you lost control of the nav point's balance, it would cause the ship's health to decrease to a point where if it reached zero, it would fall into the black hole.

For a while, I was satisfied with this, and then for a time, I thought, "This isn't very good, let's remove it." And then a few months later, I brought it back again. So I was feeling a little fickle about this feature.

Atmosphere

Before I got to the next large mechanic, I spent a good amount of time on the atmosphere of the game - I made a title screen, intro music, game music, and a generative background with shooting stars.

This part was relaxing and fun, but also a place where I could noodle indefinitely. Here was when I played around with adding 1-bit characters from an asset pack I found on itch.io. I figured this could be a fun way to introduce a way of guiding the player on what to do if necessary.

Crafting

From the outset, I knew that I wanted to have a crafting component to this game. What I didn't know was how much work that would take. There is a lot of business logic that's involved in building a crafting system, and this really slowed down the momentum of the game. In fact, it got to a point where I really didn't want to work on it because of this crafting system. Some of the work involved:

• Building the crafting menu sprite itself
• Building a means of collecting raw materials (asteroids)
• Displaying items that you've picked up in a grid
• Making it so that items that have been acquired can be combined with other items, i.e. creating recipes
• Showing the recipe once it's been crafted in the right-hand side pane of the menu
• Implementing the actual effects of that item once it has been crafted

It was around this time that I started to think to myself, "I don't really want to make a game like this." And I realized that I was losing interest. I did have fun creating the raw materials, the items, and their respective descriptions (which had to be created as PNGs):

Documenting the Journey on YouTube

At the beginning of this project, I started documenting my weekly progress on the game. This literally meant sitting in front of a camera, talking about what I had built, and then combining that with footage of the Playdate, development, and adding some reflections on top of that. I think I had some hopes that this would both a) be interesting, b) provide a record of my progress that I could feel motivated by seeing, and c) maybe get people interested in the game. Pretty typical stuff.

While I do enjoy video editing, and I don't actually mind being on camera, I did find that this was pretty tedious by the end. It was taking away from my energy that I could be spending on the game, or really, on other things as well. None of the videos really got many views, just about 100 or so views per video. I was surprised to see that some repeat people would show up and comment and provide feedback as well as encouragement. That in itself is a nice component, especially when you're building something on your own, bit by bit.

More importantly, I have a complicated relationship with social media. Mostly, I find participation in it to be a net negative for my life, personally. I felt that if I wanted something to be "successful" by the standards of YouTube, I would have to compromise some of my values on how I would present the content. This would mean creating something that would be oriented around clickbait, and unrealistic catfishing in terms of thumbnails and titles, rather than truly representative of what I want to make. At one point I was asking myself, am I trying to build an audience as fast and as large as possible? Or do I just want to make a game and be able to say I finished a game and here's what I learned?

Documenting projects on YouTube doesn't need to be mutually exclusive of those two things, but I think that if any part of me had an interest in reaching more and more people and having a "successful" video, that it really actually just took away from my original intent. It's a tough balance to be sure.

Losing Steam

I eventually did finish the crafting system. And while I would term it as the motivation killer of the project, it was what came after that made me realize I didn't want to do any more work on this thing. After finishing these mechanics, when I looked at the game, I saw something that was very robotic. There weren't any animations, there wasn't any fluidity or juice as some people refer to it in games. And that was where I started to feel the most defeated. In fact, it wouldn't be too much work to add a few animations to spruce up the game. But something about even just having to learn how the animation class worked in the Playdate just felt insurmountable. I no longer wanted to work on the project.

For what the game was, in its simplicity of the game loop, I just didn't feel like the idea and the execution so far merited any more time. Simple as that.

What I'd Do Differently

If it isn't already pretty clear from this retrospective, there are a few things I would change. I wouldn't make YouTube videos at all. I just don't think it's worth it. While I did enjoy some parts of it, I think that it took away from having the energy to finish the game, and I think that it distracted me and discouraged me.

I would have also spent more time brainstorming on what I wanted to build for my next game. While I was proud of myself for not picking the first idea that came into my head (which is what I did for my last game) and while I did indeed brainstorm several possible options, I think I should have spent more time thinking about what I really wanted to build.

Moving on

It's hard to let go of projects, especially ones that you've spent a fair bit of time on (and even more especially, ones that you have publicly discussed). It's hard to let go - but life's a bit too short to spend working on projects that you are toiling through and don't find too much joy in anymore. Thankfully, I learned a lot as I went along.

Speaking of life - things are about to change around here anyway — We're having a kid! It's nice to let go of projects to make way for this big change; and this way I have one less unfinished thing floating around in my brain during this period.

Someday, when I feel a bit more like I've got my feet under me with parenting, I might scope out something small I can build in the few scraps of time I have after the long (but rewarding) days to come. Will it be a game? Maybe. But maybe it'll be some writing, or drawing. Maybe something with a little less staring at a screen.