So... It's been 9 months since this game was first released. It was originally made for the #PlayJam2, when me and my friends had no experience, I had bought an overpriced second-hand #PlayDate on eBay, we were all prepared for the weekend of hard work and fun, with one team based in Paris (me and my friend Loïs), and one in Toulon (Arthur and Romain, the music/sound team). 

After the game's release, and from the fact that the other devs didn't see the same potential as I did in the game, I decided I wanted to improve it. I wanted levels, a menu, a story, an infinite mode, etc. I had tons of ideas, but I had one problem.

My team was gone.

I had them for a weekend, and they did some amazing work. Arthur's music got my ambitions for the game firing up, and I didn't want to stop there. But each of us had their own lives and couldn't dedicate much extra effort into this small game. It was, after all, a console that only I owned, and wouldn't reach the market until another year at least.

So, how did things progress?

I did some fixes that were documented in DevLog #1. Added a basic menu. Added images and the cool music, which didn't even make the original release.

Around February, I gave development another shot. I tried re-writing all my code. I wanted to fix the mess that we had created in that 48-hour timespan. My efforts were in vain, since re-writing everything is never a good approach when you have limited time and energy available, and the project fell flat in the following weeks. I didn't have the motivation to get it done.

***

So what changed? 

***

In July, I started a new job. I work afternoons and evenings now. I have my mornings free.

And what better to do then to pick up the projects that are resting uncomfortably in the back of my mind, finally channelling my ambitions into something real?

It was an opportunity to pick this game back up again. And so I did.

The first thing I did was to start working on the player. How it felt to be the wheel. I took inspiration from The Game Maker Toolkit's explanation of Nintendo's process – how they would spend weeks working on just Mario, nothing else, to make sure everything felt really good – jumping, running, etc. So I decided to disable every other component in the game while I focused on making the wheel feel real good.

Having removed all the clutter, I found my now-focused efforts were effective. It made it so much easier to focus on what worked instead of what didn't. 

I made the wheel accelerate easily at the smallest turn of the crank, and it would speed up to a maximum speed over multiple seconds. It jumped high, and not-so-high if you let go of the jump button early. 

With the movement satisfying me to my liking, I moved onto the next effort: The levels. 

I needed the levels to be hand-crafted, at least to some degree. I still didn't know at this point whether I would make the game an endless, procedurally-generated game, or whether I would create hand-crafted levels for the player to adventure through. Either way, I needed some amount of control over the blocks in the game.

So I built a level editor.

Not a very sophisticated one. Just enough to get platforms, kill-blocks and coins into a .json file which was then copied into my game's folder, and that my game could read. It started with just those three blocks, and I told myself, like the wheel, that I would accept the constraint and focus on what was possible with just those – ignoring the possibilities for more obstacles, enemies, power-ups and more.

And it worked great. I was so excited to have levels of my own. I could throw out all the badly-designed generative code and replace it with a proper loader of custom levels. And I could finally start interacting with the play through my level designs.

Making the player jump, making the player go fast, making them learn all the different ways this little wheel will interact with the small world it lives inside. It's the start of a new chapter!

So, where do we go from here?

Work continues on the game. There are optimisations to make, levels to design, new sounds coming, a better in-game camera and an overall revamped menu and level navigation. Then, hopefully, we can release the game as a pre-release and see how people like it.

Then, work can go into the level designer such that it's a shared asset and can be used for a range of games.

The list of things to add to Wheel Runner is long, but the most important thing to have when working on personal projects is to set an end goal and reach to it – no matter the sacrifices, the extra features, the desires... Because finishing one's project, and sharing it with the world is more reward than any number of features could bring.

The target release date is October 30th. See you then!