Cam's Cavalcade 1

So I’m someone who works on multiple projects at a time, which is very obvious if you watch my now page. However, if you have been watching my now page, you will have noticed a lot of projects coming and going. I will explain that, but first, I want to explain the goal of these devlogs and how they’ll work.

What is this series?

Cam’s Cavalcade will be a series built for the way I work on things. Firstly, one devlog will cover multiple games or projects because I work on multiple things at once. Secondly, projects may be missing from the cavalcade for a while and then come back or a new project may appear without being introduced formally. Sometimes a project may need to be put on ice for whatever reason or its whole medium may need to be changed. I want this to reflect my process the way it actually works. That said, I will try and give you a short intro to a new project and am considering putting a section on projects previously introduced but not in a certain log to make it easier to follow.

Why is this series?

I want to force myself to have a log of what I did on my projects as seeing progress is a major motivator. It’s also useless to try and gain discipline without any sort of log of behavior to gauge what needs to be changed. Also the concept of learning in public has really inspired me. It seems obvious, but the notion that going “that one didn’t work out” or just going “I’m thinking about this but not sure I’ll do it” doesn’t make people suddenly think you’re stupid is kinda crazy to me. It’s a lesson I want to reinforce for myself and its something I want to show others who may be stuck feeling like they’re a failure if they don’t finish a project for every idea that comes in their head.

When is this series?

I’m not fully sure how often I’ll update this series (I guess that’s the learning in public part lol). I’ll be putting finished tasks in here and eventually filling out the posts to be more interesting reads.

The Past Projects of This Year

January

To start the year I tried to make a SRPG Project for tactics game jam. I believe the jam ran for a week and I kinda floundered to be honest. I’m going to be a bit coy and say that having a job kinda cut into my time for this one but to be honest, I not only overscoped but was also was trying to do stuff I was very unfamiliar with. I assumed that because I understood how to set some frameworks for the RPG part that the tactics component would be the only hard part. Not true haha. The prompt for the jam was arcade so I figured making a tactics game where you had to entertain customers coming to a Dave n Busters like arcade would be a fun time. I think the idea was really funny but this one will probably go in the abandoned ideas pile or be used in an effort to practice reducing things down to their MVPs.

Also in January, I started experimenting with what I thought would be a more approachable introduction to low level development. I did a couple of different attempts at making something but learned very quickly that I had to scope down. Originally I wanted to make an old school RPG and I would still like to make one for that console, but in the end I settled on something simpler to start.

February

The simpler idea was a musical game inspired by Higher or Lower. You’d hear two notes and then have to turn the crank based on whether the new note was higher or lower than the previous. There’s not much to say about this one honestly, it’s not even abandoned, I just took it off the now page as I hadn’t touched it in a while.

March

March is when I started on Seven Sins and Seas, a pirate tactics game with boarding mechanics. By boarding mechanics I mean letting you actually takeover an enemy ship by sneaking aboard and waging combat by alternating between using your ships cannons and routing abilities and fighting on the enemy ship in a battle sort of like FIre EMblem. This game was massive and that was majorly dispiriting. Sometimes it felt like there was no point in working on it because even though I just wanted to do a little demo scenario with 3 battles, there was still 7 party members to design, model and animate. Ships to make, environments to model, a story to write with tons of characters to consider… It kinda made my head spin. This project is shelved indefinitely as a game but not in entirety. If you’ve noticed the new Worlds and Characters page, this project was the reason I finally went through with making it after debating having one for a long time. I want all that worldbuilding to still be seen and to continue writing and playing with these characters. The pages will get updated over time but I figured something where I could choose to be done after a couple of lines if I wanted was good. Eventually the pages will look all pretty and have nice formatting and such, but for now, they’re just a few lines that I can take at my own pace.

The Projects of Now

April is missing as I didn’t really try anything in April. Now, let’s get to the current projects and the little bits of progress I got going.

Otome Jam Project

This is the first time in a while that I’ve worked on a team for a jam. I was nervous but I can now say I was completely wrong to be nervous about working with others. Not just because it’s made doing things more fun, but also because my team is awesome! The lead has been super communicative and everyone on the team has been super good at what they do. I chose to reacquant myself with Renpy for this jam (before I knew how much AI was used in its development), and it’s been fun to see what things I still remember and working in it makes me feel nostalgic in a really good way.

Experiment

So I’ve been working a little bit in Unreal on an experiment. I’m still really figuring stuff out so I won’t say too much, but it’ll be a social stealth game that I plan on releasing in a sort of Early Access model on Itchio. Basically I’d want to update it at regular intervals with extra content. I’m not sure how long this would go on or when I’ll be ready to start sharing just yet, but I’ll keep y’all posted.

Wrap Up

That’s a quick overview on all the projects of the year I can talk about at the moment. Seeing them in one blog post makes me realize just how many I’ve started haha. But ultimately the ones I’ve shelved were shelved for a reason and the ones I’m currently working on I feel good about.