I hope you realize that each tiny step of this game's creation will involve learning and relearning.
I started work on this game about a year ago with another friend of mine. Together, we coded something of a basic engine, which could read in map files and spit out a traversible level. You know, the basics. And all the code was all neat and nice and everything worked well and we were excited. But give any complex piece of writing in a foreign language a year without visitation and see how well you do changing the fundamental aspects of its grammar. The biggest challenge so far, other than coming to terms with how difficult this whole project will be, has been refamiliarising myself with the old code and making the appropriate changes.
This week's project was simply to change the game from a screen-to-screen to a scrolling game, so that the art would flow better and be more of a focus, and to increase perceived game space (this game shall be claustrophobia-friendly). We will also be messing around with window size some time in the future, but that's another story. The point of this one is that I spent hours beating my head against how to adapt my old code -- it seemed like it should be so simple, but the "so simple" that it seemed like it should be was actually more complicated than the solution I eventually encountered. I just thought the harder method should be easier, and it wasn't because it clearly didn't work at all, but I spent so much time trying different ways to make it work that the idea of trying an entirely different approach evaded me. This, I believe, is called tunnelvision. Fittingly, the solution I was trying for involved trying to move everything in the game around, while the solution I found involved only changing the game's frame of reference.
The "eureka moment," which occurred only after I stepped away from the damn computer for a while and drank some coffee outside, was rapturous. Something along the lines of "I hit myself with a hammer all day because it feels so good when I stop." But seriously. This was just scrolling. Baby steps, baby steps indeed. The road ahead is fraught with hammers and caffeine, but the destination is fraught with eurekas and giraffes.
Up next: pixel-perfect collision, slope running, and creating a test level that's presentable enough for mini-demos. Because seriously. Does calling this "programmer art" even do it justice?
Next time I'll just let a cat do whatever he wants in Gimp and use that.