NOTE: This post is from my blog, written in March 2025.
After getting my latest side project uploaded in February (link here! 🎯), I set myself the goal of diving more into game development, in particular Godot, and particularly Godot 3D.
Why 3D? I don’t know. Sounded fun?
The thought was, as I live in a 3D world, maybe the physics side would be more intuitive; i.e., if I dropped a glass in my kitchen, I would expect the glass to travel downwards along the Y axis; end up hitting the floor (0,0,0?) and then I’d have to carefully sweep along the X and Z axis without cutting up my feet.
Surprisingly, this thought process has kinda worked so far. What exactly is a ‘floor’ in a 2D world? A platform? Technically, the same could be said for 3D, maybe? However, having a central point to the world (0,0,0) makes it easier for me to understand.
What am I making?
Everything, everywhere, at all times is governed by the laws of physics (duh), and physics engines are built to emulate that - but with the bonus that you can break those constraints at will. This opens up many possibilities, and, quite possibly, a lot of problems (I haven’t got that far yet).
There’s a reason why the most enduring games people play usually follow a simple premise. Football (soccer?): kick the ball in your opponent’s goal. Bowling: roll the ball and knock down all the pins. Heck, even that tossing-a-plastic-bottle-and-making-it-land-upright thing is oddly satisfying.
The thought is that even though the idea is simple, it’s the doing that creates all the different possibilities and keeps it interesting, and hopefully, satisfying. Physics engines provide so much of this out-of-the-box, and even when the physics engines get the calculations wrong, and the game goes nuts, it’s still entertaining (usually, I mea,n falling through the floor during a particularly challenging part of a game isn’t all that fun).
So yeah?
So yeah, I’m making a very basic physics-based skill game. Hopefully finding some sweet spot between being technically achievable by me, someone who knows nothing, but when played is fun and satisfying enough that people can get creative with it; taking a simple premise and competing with others (human or AI) to achieve that goal most satisfyingly.
So far
I’ve created a ‘winnable’ prototype. The player (actually 2 players) take it in turns to achieve the goal, and the one who does it more successfully gets a very exciting “Player X wins!” white text overlay message at the end.
Despite my purposely spending zero time making the game look or feel nice, it is still quite enjoyable to play, with lots of different possibilities to keep it interesting. This gives me the confidence that this idea, as simple as it is, is worth fleshing out further and continuing with.
People have already done this, right?
Absolutely. Every game idea has probably been done a hundred times or more (at least it feels like that), and that’s OK. This project is largely about me learning more about game development, and hopefully creating something that people can play and enjoy.
Not every idea needs to be completely 100% original; it can take an established idea and give it a fresh spin, merge a bunch of established ideas to make something new, or even take an established idea and kinda do it better. I’m not saying I’m going to reinvent the wheel personally, but if you look at a studio like FromSoftware, they took a “sword and board” fantasy game trope and created something genuinely special from it because they cared.
I know it’s easy to be a bit cynical in the world we live in, where everything seems to exist only to make money and make money only, and I think that’s why so many people latch onto projects that have real passion behind it, rather than a dead-eyed maximise-profits-above-all-else corporate mentality.
I’m off on a tangent now, but I’m kinda saying that whatever people choose to do, from creating something truly epic and ambitious to creating the most simple game possible, putting some real effort into it because you care almost always results in something better.
So, as green and clueless as I am, and will be for a good while, I’d like to remind myself that creating things because you enjoy them and because you want others to enjoy them is reason enough to continue.