It’s dangerous to go alone…

This past week I’ve been making really good progress on my game. I added a new final boss that lays eggs and spawns smaller enemies to fight. I added better death animations and physics to my spider robot. I tweaked my test level to try out all the different aspects of my game. But then something happened that I really didn’t expect. It reminded me of why being an indie developer is not for me. I got stuck on something.

The crawling bug enemies were visible no matter where you were in the level. This bug (no pun intended) has been pointed out to me a few times in my most recent play tests and I was determined to fix it this time. This ruins the surprise and challenge for the player. I only want the enemies highlighted when the play gets close to them. I worked on this issue for 2 days straight. I watched dozens and dozens of tutorials. Read through the Unreal Engine documentation. Watched their live webinars. But no luck in solving my issue. It was incredibly frustrating! Now I know… that finding solutions to problems is the core of what a developer does. It builds your toolbox for future issues. It builds confidence. I love a good challenge, and I love that feeling of accomplishment when I finally figure it out. But on a development team, you have people you can communicate with. You have people who can be your rubber duck. Even if the problem is completely new. You have support there to work on issues together.

Ultimately after days of un-fun debugging I finally got my enemy outline working. Even now it still bothers me! I hope that being part of a larger team alleviates these issues. I’m going to spend time looking over more of the asset’s documentation I got so I can understand where I got caught up. There is still a lot of work to be done on this project and I’m starting to feel the crunch! Time is money as they say so I’d better get back to it!