March '26

How do I explain the process of game development?

If you try to find a succinct explanation online, it comes down to terminology of "pre-production, production, testing, pre-launch, etc", and as a game developer I find those terms extremely unhelpful. It's unfortunately not so linear and simple of a path forward. I've had a pause from development over the transition between 2025 and 2026, and I've evaluated the best step forward being to take a step backwards. I've undone and redone some of my work because adding on top of what I had was becoming an increasingly unstable pile of jenga blocks.

Gameplay is built on game mechanics and narrative.

Which is really hard to produce when I struggled to make my game mechanics work in ways that they were not originally intended to.

Here are some specific changes I have been working through

- The player character controller

I removed character movement and interactive behaviour to replace it with a more lightweight system that only had the components that I needed.

- Player object interaction

I added a new system to tell the game when the player was near an interactable object and what would happen when they interacted with it.

- Custom branching dialogue integration 

I modified a Unity engine tool ("Behaviour Graph") to integrate a visual branching diagram so I can add to and edit conversation interactions much more easily

- Player character mechanic for "Eaglevision"

The player can use a special sight mode to symbolize acute hearing abilities and ability to see spiritual markers.

- Level design

The visual storytelling of the world and how the gameplay is executed has to be tested in parallel to the game mechanics themselves. I enjoy designing the appearance of the occasional character or prop in the world, but that is currently not the most important development process for me.

- Graphical performance

I want the most immersive graphics that I can provide at the least computational cost. It's important to me that the graphics are both beautiful and don't restrict a large portion of players from enjoying the game by making it difficult for a computer to run it. I'm doing intermittent testing to try to find a happy balance to get the best quality I can.

Please feel free to email me any questions or comments you may have