When you do game development on your own, aka. solo development, you have to (or at least you should) do multiple things at a somewhat acceptable level. You should be able to do drawings because simple shapes like circles, squares, and triangles will look very boring in a very short time. You should be able to produce sounds because a mute game will also be boring very soon. Maybe you should be able to make music too. Then there is the more technical side: programming; without it, you would not be able to even try. Maybe you also should know how to design a game; otherwise, you will fall into the very common pitfalls. Also, UI design is not a bad skill either, because if the UI is bad, it will ruin the whole experience, right? So... a few skills to master?
The reason why I started with this observation is that I have been working on all of these fields in the past month, and it has been a bit overwhelming. Drawing, making sounds (even some music), bugfixing, and creating new features and designing them, creating more bugs, refactoring some existing code, or re-designing a feature. Nothing really new, but when you do lots of different things and encounter new problems in somewhat new areas, it feels a bit stressful. Still, I'd like to make everything by myself and not buy them. I'm not sure if this is already a doomed task, but time will tell.
I also think I should start taking small notes while I'm working; it would be easier to write this development blog with the memo notes. But in a nutshell, most of the time has gone for power-up systems and sound effects/music.
I created this short demo to show the current status. You might see some default symbols and images here and there, but let's not let that bother us. Enjoy the demo:
Some thoughts for the end. Gameplay is the main thing in the games, in my opinion; if it is not polished enough, the game is not working and it is not fun to play. For now, it seems that this project has that problem. Maybe I have played the same scene over and over again, so I am just bored with it, but it feels like something is missing. Anyhow, I'm planning to finish and polish the current work-in-progress features and such, and then I have to design to make the current core gameplay a bit more enjoyable. Easier to say than done, but such is life.
Thanks for reading!
-Teemu, TheAspen