I always start with the exact same delusion. I will watch a ten minute YouTube video about a solo developer making a hit game, and I instantly convince myself that I can do it too. I open up the Godot engine feeling completely inspired and ready to work. My plan is never even that complicated. I just want to build a very simple fishing mechanic in a cozy little 2.5D world.
In my head, I am just a few lines of code away from creating a tiny digital masterpiece. But the moment I actually look at the blank script editor, reality hits me like a brick.
Game development is honestly just a constant cycle of feeling like a genius for five seconds and then feeling like an absolute idiot for the next three days.
I will write a basic script just to make my character cast a fishing line into the water.
I click the play button expecting to see a smooth and relaxing animation.
Instead, my character violently launches the fishing rod into the sky, the water physics break completely, and the entire game immediately crashes. I then spend the next six hours trying to figure out why basic gravity refuses to work in my digital world.
This is exactly when the endless nightmare of tutorial hell begins. I start aggressively searching forums and watching obscure videos from years ago just trying to find a solution. I will find a tutorial that does exactly what I need, but it is written for an older version of the engine, so half of the code does not even work anymore. I end up frantically copying and pasting different lines of code from three different sources.
I basically try to duct tape it all together and just pray that the engine accepts my bizarre spaghetti code without giving me another red error message.
Another funny thing that happens during this process is feature creep. I tell myself
I am only going to make a simple fishing game.
But then my brain starts wondering if the player should be able to cook the fish. So now I need a cooking mechanic. And if they cook the fish, they should probably be able to sell it at a market. Now I am suddenly trying to program a complex dynamic economy system when my main character still does not even have a walking animation. I constantly want to build an entire universe when I barely know how to make a basic menu screen work properly.
Being a solo indie developer means you have to wear every single hat, and you quickly realize that you are terrible at wearing almost all of them.
Once I finally get the fishing bobber to land in the water, I realize my art looks like a blurry potato. I have to switch from being a frustrated programmer to being an incredibly untalented digital artist. I spend another entire evening just trying to draw a pixel art fish that does not look like a floating green rectangle. There is nobody else to blame when things look bad, and that is a deeply humbling experience.
But despite all the endless frustration and the broken code, I keep coming back to it.
There is a very specific type of joy that happens when you finally fix a bug that has been haunting you for a week. When my little pixelated character actually catches a fish and the score goes up, it feels like actual magic. I know my code is an absolute mess underneath the surface, but it is my mess. I am slowly building a tiny world entirely from scratch.
So even though my game engine makes me want to pull my hair out most nights, I know I am going to open it right back up tomorrow.
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