2021 was quite a heavy year of development. Several projects were added to the mix. There were a lot of long nights without coffee fighting off bugs, working on complex systems, and trying to cram information into an already full brain.

Completed: First Side Project

Throughout the year, one thing I looked into is how other developers in the space have been able to survive for so long while working on projects that will take years before you get the satisfaction of making it to a full game release. The solution seemed to be to work on side projects.

Side projects seemed to have the possibility to resolve quite a few issues. As long as you keep them in check and finish them.

I have discovered that:

• They give the mind a break to solve other problems
• They allow you to experiment in different ways
• They allow you to increase your skill set in a way that your current main project is not
• They allow you to finish something and have that feeling of accomplishment.

This was all discovered after finishing a short story-driven project. I always wanted to give one of those scripting programs that are out there for creating more or less multiple-choice narratives. I ended up going with ChoiceScript.

The process was documented on Hive:

• Side Project | Part 1. Taking A Look At ChoiceScript And CSIDE
• Side Project | Part 2. Things Are Nearing Completion
• Announcement | A Universe From Nothing A Text Adventure Game Now On Itch.io

This allowed me to finally also get something out there. The learning opportunities it created for the small amount of investment in time were well worth it. I became a believer in using the occasional side project.

Work In Progress: Second Side Project

While working out and doing quite a few things throughout the year on my main project. I ended up hitting a bit of a setback. Some software I wanted to use to handle many server-side things which I’ve still struggled with had announced they had a massive delay on their release.

After much struggle trying to do things, I decided late into the year to start up another side project. This time I would be using a different game engine to the one I’ve been using. I had been itching to give 001 Game Creator from a humble bundle I bought a while back a try. Now was my chance.

This project is a bit more involved than my first side project and will take a bit longer to finish. It’s however not something that will take years; instead, many weeks. While I’m still working on what I can in the main project it has been fun putting a few hours a day as a break into making an RPG with 10 zones and quite a few dungeons.

I’m expecting to finish this in the first quarter of 2022. It could be a week or two from now or a little longer. It will depend on bugs and how much time I’m able to put into it.

Like the first project, I have documented it on Hive. The end goal is to release it hopefully on Itch as an HTML5 game.

• 001 Game Creator | Giving It A Try
• 001 Game Creator | More Maps
• 001 Game Creator | More Maps Part 3
• 001 Game Creator | Play Testing And Quest Scripting
• 001 Game Creator | Part 5: Working on Items, Compile, And HTML5 Test

I’ve enjoyed being able to get back into making maps again in a game during the process so far. Many of the other things that have been a struggle in more powerful and complex games engines are more simplified and limited. Which I have rather enjoyed working with so far as it has allowed me to mostly focus on what I want to enjoy working on.

Main Project: Nightly Dungeon

Most of the development resources for the year were spent on further working on @Nightlydungeon. This was quite a heavy year of doing things that I’ve found more challenging than the first year of working on the game. It has expanded like crazy in depths and complexity on the side of the game development end.

While you can find quite a lot of posts on going over many things from working on features to patch notes on @Nightlydungeon. There are a couple of moments throughout the year that comes to mind.

The first was getting used to using the name I had come up with for the game in public settings. You get used to doing things in a certain way. While I had set up and taken the name of the project on a few sites as early as 2020. It was something I needed to make more of an effort of doing. To this day many still don’t know the name of the project and are aware of those posts being made on a different account now.

The second was to start posting from the @Nightlydungeon account itself. While short-term visibility would drop like a rock. Long term the project needed to start building itself upon its account. I also needed to get used to making some kind of an effort to have updates. Some different formats for posts were even tried.

The biggest step of them all for the year was getting out something tangible. This was a project I started back in 2020 and many wanted to see it and test things out. It was a big step to open the game to the public in our [first of a couple of demos such as this one.

While there is still a lot of work to be done that just comes with the nature of making a game. There are game developers out there who will spend over a decade on something and will never have the guts to ever release anything at all. This was not going to be one of those projects.

One of the biggest challenges of the year was working on the items and having monster drops. There was more than likely a point people got rather tired of me posting one update after another about working on items. There are a lot of repetitive and time-consuming tasks in making a game. That is just a part of the journey and so where many posts like working on loot tables.

There are also some funny moments when looking back at things now. There was one moment I spent eight hours to find and fix a little bug that was breaking loot. The internal testers usually find the fun ones. Such as mistyping the game's name, falling through the world, or a bugged mesh extending its collision blocking the otherwise open path through a zone.

There were also a lot of dang-it moments. Far more than just bricking the institution that I did in 2020 or tracking down bugs for way too long. The kind of stuff you test, test, and test some more. Everything is working fine. You release it into a small group of testers and in the actual release environment, things are not working as they should be. Even worse when you can’t find the issue or a solution after trying to troubleshoot it for weeks. The only information you can find online is a bunch of game developers hitting the same wall with a somewhat similar but different issue.

For the most part, a lot of fun that I’ve had working on the project involved creating zones. Recently a new main town map was created that has yet to be released. @Nightlydungeon is now no longer the only game I’ve created maps or zones in which I find to be quite exciting.

Looking Forward: 2022

2022 is going to be the year of a lot of swearing when working on my main project. With how massive a game like @Nightlydungeon is I worked on what I could do first. With each year requiring more experience tackling even harder challenges. 2022 will be the hardest year yet for the project.

Thankfully I have a side project to work on along with some other involvements that will give me a bit of a break when I need. I have been running quite hard on this project since 2020. While there have been some moments of breaks and weeks I did not have much to talk about. It’s been an interesting ride.

Unlike the first two years of my main project where I could build out a roadmap way in advance and I’d just check things off week after week following a heavy schedule and getting most things done on time. 2022 is not going to be the case. Things are going to take as long as they take me as I deal with stuff that got pushed off or set aside to deal with at a later date. That date is coming up.

Previous Year Statement

• Enjar Games End Of Year Statement 2020

Information

The screenshots were taken and the content was written by @Enjar of @Enjargames.