At the risk of bringing motivation levels to an all-time low... What part of making a game do you dislike the most? Which aspect is keeping you from finishing your game?

For me, I think it's the slogrudgburlingly arduous task of making maps. Tile after tile needs to be laid down... a tree here, a stump there, how about some different colored grass in this corner, maybe a fence or a rock next to this patch of snow. Blargh! Giant squares of grass should be sufficient! Pixel art sometimes gets to me in the same way, but it's usually more interesting.
I'm really glad a strong effort is being made to improve VERGE's map-making utilities!

So what bugs you?

The main things that annoy me are tile import fails unless the image is small or you try importing 25 billion times. Flood-fill crashes the editor if the map is too large (probably due to recursion), so making big maps is very annoying. Dragging outside of the editting window with a mouse tool freezes Maped. Lack of brushes present a minor problem, in that I can hold one tile grouping at a time, via the clipboard tool.

So, you could say maps are the biggest pain I have (which, I should add, isn't that big of a pain). But, even then, I can fairly make decent looking maps with what I have. That, or art, when I'm trying to do an ambitious project that requires tons of spritery.

Maping makes me want to kill. Making tiles and sprites use to make me want to kill, but the urge is less these days.

Doing stupid things like Line of Sight with integers or bending the hookretrace function to my will brings me great joy for some reason.

I like scripting maps until the map VC gets to wild to control.

For me, I like making maps... I like coding... but what gets in my way are... well the team members who don't work >=/

Giant squares of grass are sufficient! Especially if you're not an artist. Programmer art is awesome socks. Just crap out the general idea and leave the rest to the artists and designers! If you're a one-man show, leave it until the end! Coding is almost always more difficult, so best to handle it first.

The key to positively charging any kind of development experience is a steady stream of small and easily attainable goals. Read my current blog entry to get a dose of programming in Tasty Bite-Sized Increments! (tm)

If I were to actually pick something that used to bother me though, it would be the quirkiness of compilers like DJGPP! In hindsight, it was probably usually bugs in my own code. Bugs that could've been avoided by tackling smaller problems with quicker turnaround!

Quote:


Toen.

Really? I get a very tangible pleasure out of completing a nice tileset, and even more so from a well-assembled map!

Quote:


Absolutely. Graphics work is enormous fun. I get the most joy designing a GUI, mind you. It's not too big a job and messing around with styles (both in game and on sketch book) is hugely amusing.