Games and Creativity

I've wanted to get into game dev for a while now. It seems like the logical place to go for fun coding problems and cool visualizations. But man, game dev is hard. Graphcis programming is becoming my white whale. I've failed to learn OpenGL so many times now. And aside from the technical challenge, games are art. Art style, sound, storytelling are more important than coding, and I am definitely not an artist. This means it is important to set my expectations low.

I've appreciated the idea of fantasy consoles, like the TIC-80 and PICO-8 for a while. Their limitations are helpful in constraining my ambition. But using the TIC-80's built-in editor is not a great user experience. So I started playing around with pyxel, a python library inspired by these consoles. Drawing graphics, playing sounds, and dsipalying text are simple functions. Input handling is easy. My art skills are non-existent, but dealing with tiny sprites with a limited color palette limits how badly I can screw up. So I decided to make a very very very simple game.

Even this was challenging. The process of taking even a very simple idea and making it into a prototype was frustrating to me. But this is my usual experience for any creative endeavor. Creativity, I think, is a skill that I do not exercise often enough because it is so hard. I even struggle to write these little blog posts. Steven Pressfield called it The Resistance. The only way I can get through is to just bang out something and not care too much about quality. So in that spirit, here is Pizza Thief: a game in which you play as a dog attempting to steal a pizza while their human is not looking (based on a true story). Move with arrow keys, press space bar to bark. Only two levels for now, and I haven't implemented obstacles yet. And my first attempt at exporting something for the web, so we'll see how it works. Source code here. Play the game here (until I figure out how to embed this in a post...)