I don't play video games anymore. I've had my fill of that when I was younger, and nowadays the cost of doing it just seems too high. But back when I did, I remember really enjoying “Into The Breach”. When I was trying to come up with project ideas, this game came up as something that I could attempt to recreate. My reasoning was that it seemed to require relatively little assets, and the development process would be more focused on programming and systems building. The latter I consider myself to be naturally stronger at. Don't take me wrong, I can do some art, but it will not be even close to what I can do on the development side.

I have been working on this project for almost half a year now. Sitting down with it whenever I have time, energy and motivation outside of work to do so. What I have created so far closely follows to what is in the game that I am trying to emulate. Maybe a little too close for my liking. Because of that, I intend to branch off and take the project somewhere else relatively soon.

Why emulate “Into The Breach”? I consider that game to be a masterpiece in design. A very simple, easily understandable concept. Clear visual cues about what is going on and what is going to happen. Surprising amount of depth and right level of challenge. As I work on my own project trying to recreate it, I can really appreciate the amount of thought that has gone into that game, and I learn quite a lot in the process.

One of my main guidelines for this project has been to spend as little time on the graphics as possible. For me, there is no reason to polish something that is not proven to be "fun" yet, for I can get stuck and I lose all motivation to continue. This is a mistake I have made many times before.

Main things that I have built so far:

- grid system - pathfinding - ability template creator - scriptable tiles for path - effect tiles framework - unit framework - basic game manager - basic health system

As for the next steps, I plan on implementing first ability effect - knockback. Then a couple of other effects. In the process I plan on building a modular system that will allow to maintain and develop these effects easily. The goal is to be able to prototype and test abilities without too much effort - this will help with fine tuning gameplay and coming up with something that is fun. What I don't want is that the whole thing becomes messy explosion in the spaghetti factory, which is a big risk for this part of the game. This will be the biggest challenge for me in the near future.

Plan for this dev blog is to post summaries of what I've built, what I am struggling with currently and what I plan on doing in the future. To help me organize my thoughts, to be able to look back and to have something to track my progress against. Game development is a very long and arduous process, it’s an incredibly huge undertaking. It is really easy to get stuck and loose motivation. It has happened to me countless times before. I hope that through this journal, among some other changes in my approach, I will be able to keep myself going this time.

It is a journey. I don't know where it will take me. I do it not for what I could get at the end. I do it for the experience, I do it for what I become on the way.