Dev Journal: Not Quite Matching

Working on Project Wild One has had a lot of weird implications for coming back to Project Matchmaker. For one, it made me a little embarrassed to have released something so unappealing to look at… implying that now that I’ve gone and made PWO look halfway decent, I’ve accidentally raised the bar for myself and now I feel like PMM needs to match it. I’ve always believed the content comes first, but it’s true that the packaging, the GUI and all that, can do a lot to “set the mood” and alter your emotional impression, so it’s probably true that I should at least strive not to hinder myself overmuch in that regard. Unfortunately, this game’s themes might actually be more demanding, style-wise…

But it’s not just the looks that I’m regretting with PMM at this point. I went into this update saying I wanted to fix a lot of problems in the backend to make this project work better in the long run, and… while it’s certainly working better, it cost much more time, energy, and sanity than I’d hoped, coming from all the fun I’d had with PWO. I think that an important part of why I’d had such a good time building a new project from the ground up was a certain contrast I’d actually pushed to the back of my mind: the soul-crushing despair of trying to figure out a huge mess of someone else’s code well enough to alter it meaningfully.

This isn’t to speak poorly of the programmer I commissioned, he took great efforts to leave comments on everything and try to make it easy for me to pick up where he left off, but it’s gradually become clear that there are several obstacles that no amount of commenting will remove.

The first is probably just that I’m still not a very robust programmer. I’ve got enough experience to feel partway confident and I’ve made a decent prototype from scratch, but there are still worlds of theory and practices out there I’ve never even heard of. And well, that’s okay. I’m not trying to make immensely complicated games, and I don’t think I have to worry too much about optimization or the like. I can get things working my own way, and that’s enough to forge forward. But when I’m dealing with someone else’s work, the tools they use and the styles they write in can be so wildly foreign to me I’m not even sure how to look them up, and it can be crushingly hard to build up any momentum when every line of code presents new confusion, sometimes multiple times. I can write my own, but working with someone else’s is still worlds away, it seems.

The second issue, which actually interacts directly with the first to make things that much more difficult, is that this body of code isn’t precisely for my needs. When I wrote PWO, every single part of it was designed from the ground up to accomplish my goals. The engine for PMM was written from the programmer’s understanding of my intentions, and as I often discover when commissioning art, no matter how much you put in the specs, there will always be unexpected confusion. Sometimes parts are designed just a little off, sometimes they seem to be going in a very strange direction, and sometimes they jump through a lot of elaborate hoops and it’s really unclear if that’s for some specific reason I haven’t found yet, or if they don’t actually feel as comfortable as I do with certain tools, especially around text manipulation. Maybe that’s one field I’ve specialized into a little? But I’m not sure, and that makes it that much harder to tell what I should be learning from and what I should be changing.

And well, this is sort of separate, but closely tied to the above issue: we tried out a big, fancy plugin meant for text-based games. It serves as the core of the game’s content management… but it’s not very well-suited to it. It does have some helpful features, but in many ways it can be stifling, and seems to have been intended for far smaller volumes of text than I put out. Even when I’ve been trying to trim down the length of my scenes and such with this one, compared to MVOL… It’s slowed things down a lot just trying to plug everything into this system and get it working, and there’s a lot I don’t know about it since it has a lot of semi-hidden behind the scenes stuff going on, so that’s made bugfixes still more complicated at times. Plus plus, that means that some of the code I’m sifting through has comments both from the plugin creator as well as the programmer I commissioned, and my own changes and comments here and there, and it’s just… a lot. I thought things would get simpler once I really got dug in, but in some cases it might be the opposite.

Partway through all this I realized this turned into a lot of melodramatic complaining… Sorry about that. I do love my job, even when it becomes a crawl at times. But it felt good to at least get it off my chest after all this. And… I got into explaining all that because I was meaning to make a point, even if I went a little overboard.

I did a lot of patch jobs to get this version working better and closer to what I want, but at this point I feel it’s clear that if I’m going to keep going forward with PMM, it needs more than “fixing.” I think I’m going to need to rebuild it from scratch, importing pieces from this version where I can but focusing on making it a project I actually understand, made for my goals. Fortunately, this game is far less complicated mechanically than PWO, so it shouldn’t be nearly as lengthy a process as building PWO was. Honestly, I’d considered just rebuilding it from the start of this cycle, but I wasn’t sure if it was necessary, so I didn’t want to discard all this work without trying to understand it better. I did learn some things from it, and there’s probably a lot more I could still learn from this engine, but knowing what I do now, I do wish I’d just taken the plunge then. That doubt and uncertainty was one more element to how… discouraging a lot of the work for this update was.

But the bulk of the work is done, and Project Matchmaker v0.02 is finally coming together. With this update, we’ll finally be rounding out what would effectively be the tutorial/introduction to the game, and you’ll get a little hint of how things would advance from there. This update will hopefully give you a pretty solid idea of what to expect from this concept.

For now though, there’s still a few more little bits that need written in and implemented, but hopefully I’ll be sending this version off to my proofers ere much longer! After that… I’ve got another new idea for a project I’m pretty interested to try, less as an ambitious larger game and more as an exploration of a simpler idea, and a learning experience/challenge to myself on several levels. I think it should make for a pretty unique experience. Plus, I’m intending to hold another big vote once people can play PMM v0.02, so keep an eye out for that!

Thanks for reading!

Oh, P.S.: You might have noticed the site has been a little spotty lately. Sorry about that! I reached out to my host and they say they’re working on it. I’m hoping I don’t have to switch services altogether, but this had better clear up soon.