"Oh hey, just remembered I haven't gotten my article in for this month!"
looks at clock8:30 PM, September 30"Oh poop"
Hi. It's koola. You may know me from "wow this game is good" and "wow Toby Fox is amazing" and "something something music".
I made a game called
OMNIFATE. Originally, I wanted to document the game's entire development on my blog page, but that did not end up happening, sadly.
I released OMNIFATE on September 9, 2023. If you want, you can pic
k it up right now from this link:
https://store.steampowere...com/app/2521970/OMNIFATE/I just wanted to spend some time going over its development history. Originally started as a companion project to a cancelled
Game Builder Garage game,
OMNIFATE's first playable version was a puzzle platformer. At the time, I was very proud of it. Looking back at it now, frankly that prototype sucked: it showed very little signs of polish (even though I had promised polish from it online), lack of o
riginality (the first couple prototypes did not use original music), and you couldn't even die.
I worked on that version of the game for about two months, most of which was spent fine-tuning the physics. Honestly, at some point, I do want to make a platformer game, although I don't think that will happen any time soon.
That version of
OMNIFATE was made in Unity. Unity is supposed to be an easy engine for newcomers to the field to learn, however nothing I wrote ever ended up working. I don't think that was the engine's fault; rather, I think it was the raw difficulty of C# for amateurs.
After about two months of development and the release of a
demo publicly available prototype, I had felt like I was just growing overly tired of the project. I wanted to call it quits, and was thinking that this sort of thing is just not something a person of my age could come up with.
Fast forward
a month. I was deciding what to do with the project. At the time, I had not fully realized what my favorite genre of video game is, but I had known that I had a fun time with many a turn-based RPG, so I decided to go with that. I could not find a single tutorial for RPGs in Unity, so I gave up.
In September 2021, I was considering my options. I could abandon the project directly, or start in a new engine. I looked in
to several options, but the one I ended up using was GameMaker Studio 2, which later officially changed its name to just GameMaker.
GameMaker seemed like a breath of fresh air. A unique workspace, tabs, no switching windows, and I could kind of understand the code! I followed a tutorial on top-down movement in GameMaker and understood about 81% of what was going on. The way the tutorial's code was structured meant that I had to have a walking animation.
I asked my friend Rain if she could draw a walking animation for the player character, and waited. And waited. And waited. She was procrastinating,
but so was I. I could have just made the walking animation, but I wanted it to look nice.
I ended up waiting for seven months. I regret that timespan the most out of anything I regret throughout the development cycle, because
at any point I could have just slapped up a prototype walking animation.
On one d
ay in June 2022, I finally snapped out of it and made the dang walking animation. After that, things finally started to look up. Throughout the rest of that summer, every day I worked wholeheartedly on every aspect of the game, with the goal of releasing a demo by the end of it. I succeeded. I released a demo of
OMNIFATE on GX.games on August 30, 2022, two days before my deadline. After that, I worked on the rest of the game, and completed it in March 2023.
After that, I released a trailer, and sat my butt down. I relaxed. I playtested the game multiple times, noticed several bugs, but patched only a few. (I caught the mind disease known as "procrastination" again.) I also got several other people to playtest, and promised them the bugs that they found would be fixed. (I didn't fix them.)
In one day in July, I finally saved up money for publishing on Steam. I got everything ready, and asked my parents for playtesting. They proceeded to lovingly and caringly point out every bug they saw, while I wrote them down all while crying and telling them that I couldn't fix the bugs. Looking back on it, I was being a brat to my loving and caring parents who only wanted to see a quality game released.
So I fixed every bug that was written down, and they found more. This process repeated twice before I finally felt that a genuine, final, quality product was ready. I submitted everything, and relaxed again. It was like a burden had been lifted off my shoulders.
That's where we are today. The game has released, and I'm currently working on another project, in a different genre. (*It's not the platformer.)
Thanks for reading this, and hopefully you enjoy the fruit of my (mostly) hard work.
I've been koola, and, why are some letters bolded? Those weren't bolded when I was writing the article...?
(I'm sorry for the lack of a quickly written article this month. I was mostly focusing on school and family.)
