Was the title catchy enough? Well it's true anyway.

I planned to finish the prototype within this week, but the more I worked on the project the more stuffs I must implement before the prototype is finished.

Ever  heard of people said that you should develop your prototype as fast as you can?

Well apparently it's not easy to make a proper prototype without prior knowledges or assets required to make the prototype.

Let me make it clear here, this is actually prototype and not vertical slice. There would be a lot of workload before I could finish the vertical slice.

The planned prototype is to have the player equiped with all the skills that the player can use along with simple movement, to fight against the placeholder boss which only have basic implementation so it only functional as normal monsters.

If we only talk about using skill and dealing damage then the boss die, it'd be so easy to develop. But I had to implement the skill system which will allowed the flexibility in the future. Though it's a bit too big for the game of my scale, but the ease of making more skills really great.

Even now there are still bugs in the first skill I made which is the most complicated one which I lost count on how many times I fixed all those bugs.

There is also the target lock system, which took me quite sometime to finish. Though I'd say it's working great. The hard part would be the fact that I didn't have much knowledge about widget, so I had to figure out how I should implement the involved system. Right now it could display the HP of the boss and updated the moment it's taking damage.

The part which is left for the prototype would be the damage taken system for the player, which I could just attach to the player and implement the functions.

There is also mana system which I never think about it thoroughly. As a matter of fact, I never play a game with good mana system before and I can't describe clearly what is good mana system .

So the best I can do is to treat it similar to stamina and change that stupid bugged skill into mana siphoning skill, though it'll be more like mana recovery skill instead.

As of right now, I'd say I need at least another week to work on the mana system and bandaging the rest of stuffs required to finish the prototype.

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This is how I feel about working on game development for over 6 years with roughly 10 years in gamedev circle.

It feels like all the "game engine" we're using(Unreal, Unity) are just frameworks for us to build our own "game engine".

No wonder a lot of people just discouraged and find something else to do.

Veterans are those with experiences enough to quickly implement these systems which allowed them to develop prototypes easily, or even have those systems ready for a long time because they'd been working for a long time.

Well I can't deny that I'm too is veteran game developer, though I'm always indie developer and only joined a team once which disbanded after a few months. So I'm technically a lifetime solo indie.

But from the start, I barely have anything to bring to now. Because I mainly worked on my soft skills and unfucked my life. It's like I'm just starting the life XD

Actually it's thanks to my project management skill which I learnt during my educational years. I was a mess even until now, but compared to people without proper project management skill, I'm much better sorted in both design and development side.

The most important thing in systems design is data structure. If you messed up this part, you'll be so confused even with detailed documents. That's why I'm always taking notes and usually occupied with the game development thoughts.

I'll be honest here. The reason I'm enduring all these tedious works is because I could feel that there are a lot of "fun" stuffs that waiting for me to work on later. It's the promise for the future.

Don't get me wrong, developing systems is still fun. But how I wish that I'm so talented to never make bugged systems. Maybe in the future when I'm better than the me right now.

I'm so glad that I committed to blueprint visual scripting instead of pushing c++ for this. My plan is to go on solo, I don't have time to perfect a language. I probably have better games published before those c++ folks have a scuffed game published.

There is also another thing that fellow solo devs might feel discouraged.

It's when "indie game dev" posted about their games and talk as if they're working solo.

Then at some point they exposed themselves as "a team" and pretended that they're never claimed to be a solo.

Games that look great are either a team of talented people worked on it for sometime or a solo worked on it for years before they have something to show.

It's seriously disheartening when you're surfing too much social network. That's why I stopped using them and entered hermit mode like this.

Alright this will be my update blog post for now. I'll come back with more blog posts in the future, let's see if I'll have a prototype uploaded and ready to test.

At that point please come to test and give me some feedbacks. I'm a solo indie game developer without any reliable friends to contact. I'm sorry if you're my friends, but I lost faith in you guys a long time ago because you guys never be supportive toward me on this rough path that I'd been walking alone for so long.