Hey everyone!
Welcome to “Game developer rants about the most challenging and most rewarding moments when working on My Beautiful Paper Smile”. Throughout the creation of any game, there are times that make you feel like the greatest game developer of all time, and times when you want to quit altogether. It can occasionally feel like there’s no inbetween, and that all your effort is for nothing, but at the end of the day, I know this is what I want to be doing. So, here are my top two challenging, and rewarding times, during the development of MBPS.
Challenging Moment #1: Polishing
Fixing bugs… is really… really… fun (sarcasm). Fixing bugs and making other improvements is one of the most important things to do when making a game. If you have mechanics that are a little bit off, or menus that don’t work quite how you’d expect, people will notice. It’s super important to get as many corners of a game polished as possible. The saddest reality is, the bigger the game, the less you can get away with.
Rewarding Moment #1: Finishing stuff
Every time you finish a large section of gameplay, it feels great. You get to look at a unique environment, with fresh animations, and see exciting new story developments in action. It’s awesome to have something new in front of yourself. Try sitting in front of the same 5 minute slice of a game for three months (I guess that could be “Challenging Moment #1.5”). As much as I love this game, it’s a huge breath of fresh air whenever I finish one part of it and get to move onto another.
Challenging Moment #2: Planning and strategizing
After the initial high of finishing a section of gameplay, there comes another hurdle; sitting still long enough to write out a comprehensive plan for the next section of gameplay. Sometimes it’s a part of the game I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and I already have an idea of how everything will work, but most of the time I still have lots of fine details to figure out. For example, right now I could be planning out a very big, important, scary part of My Beautiful Paper Smile, but because it’s big and scary, I’m procrastinating by writing this devlog. Seriously, I don’t need this thing ready for another week.
Rewarding Moment #2: Seeing people get into the game
I think the most rewarding thing about creating My Beautiful Paper Smile is seeing people get really into it. Watching YouTubers and streamers get excited about it, and seeing the awesome fan-art you guys have made has been amazing. I saw a comment on a let’s play video of the game, that was basically a page-long sociological analysis of the game. It’s really cool seeing people theorizing on the lore and different characters, and I can’t wait for the game to release so you can get even more stuff to chew on!
That’s all I’m going to put into today's devlog. Hopefully that gives you a better understanding of how this process works, and what it’s like to work on a game like this.
Until next time! Keep smiling :)
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