Publishing my first game ever

Hello there !

Thanks for stopping by. If you read this, you might have seen that I recently launched my first game: Tourtour. As it has been quite a long and difficult process for me, I wanted to write a little blurb on the game and tell you what lead me to publish this.

I have been coding for most of my life, and I am coding professionally, although not in the field of video games, but in scientific computation. When I was younger, I learned to code to make video games. I went pretty far with a buddy in high-school, and developed my own 3d engine back then, but never released a game. I forgot the idea until a few years back when I decided to look for game engines that would suit my ideas. When I stumbled upon Godot 2 I was amazed at what it could do "for an open source project". I started learning it and slowly started a couple of projects, but never finished anything. 

Finally, six months ago, after giving up on yet another project I decided that what I needed was to do something simple, to finish it, and to publish it on Itch. So thought hard about what was the easiest game I could make that would not be a platformer and settled for a tower defense. I decided that I would need to scope to be very small, something that could be finished in 15-30 minutes would be a great start. Three levels, and that's it, no more. No dialogue, no RPG elements, just a very simple system, very limited, with no possibility for me to get side-tracked into adding impossible stuff. However I also wanted to do something that would look like a finished game with a bit of polish, tutorials, a menu, etc. 

So that was it for the idea. Three levels, a very limited amount of towers, a few enemies, and let's roll.

Now even if the scope was small, I realized two things : 

1. Managing to find the time after work, when you have a family life can be really tricky

2. Even with a small scope, the amount of polish necessary to make a game is ... intimidating.

For the first point, it can be easy to get sidetracked. My job is very important to me, and my family time as well. So that means, I could only work on Tourtour during the nights. A couple of hours max per day. Still with the moments where I had no motivation, the moments where I was too busy or tired, it was difficult to be disciplined and to manage to work every single day on the project. Hence the fact that it took me six months to finish. However, looking back on that, I learned so much in these six months that I believe it would take me a lot less time now to do a similar project.

That last statement joins the second point. Making a playable prototype was real easy. Making a finished game was really difficult. Among the worst difficulty I did not expect to face, here's my top 3 :

1. Game balancing: Holy **** it is HARD even for a small scope tower defense to make a game that is both challenging, fun and balanced. The amount of bits and pieces that can influence [break] the game is really intimidating.
2. UI: People managing to build efficient UIs quickly deserve so much respect. Having something that is readable, pleasant to the eye and functional is SO difficult. I lost something like two weeks by saying to myself "Hey, I should add a small tutorial". Oh god the amount of pain that came out of this sentence.
3. Game architecture: Organizing the different scenes and nodes together is something less than trivial. This is something I find lacking when learning about gamedev. How the many scenes should interact together and be linked. 

For all these reasons, I have first to say that I am in awe of people releasing games. I have the utmost respect for you now that I know how difficult tying up everything together can be. But also that I loved this experience, and I cannot wait to start a new challenge on another game.

So what's next ?

Before starting a new game, I want to finish a few things on Tourtour. One of them is localization. I am French and I'd like my parents to play the game, so I will have to localize it. Hopefully it will not be too painful. I am also thinking of adding an "easy mode" where you can see where towers are the most effective for people struggling with the game. Friends of mine would like a "new game+" with more difficulty (especially the idea of carrying money from one level to the next), but I think it's gonna be too much work, and I'd like to move on to another project. If optimization is better since this morning (who could have thought that this small piece of code where I sort every enemy for every tower at each physics frame, would come back to haunt me ??? ;D) I think I could do a little more to make the game really smooth and perfect on most machines. Last but not least, I would like to try an Android export with Godot to learn how to do it, but I have no idea how much work this is going to represent.

Thank you for reading this, and please feel free to leave me a comment or a rating if you enjoyed the game :)