During one of my burnout–depressive phases, I suddenly felt a spark of creativity — something I hadn’t felt in ages. So I did the best thing I could — used it as effectively as possible. It was a perfect time to finally move on and try creating a small project. The smaller the better with hopes of snowball effect. And as I do creative work why not to learn something new along the way, right? A reason came naturally to finally try it – Godot Engine in version 4. I decided to ramp up the challenge: build the game’s core in a gamejam style. Three days. What could go wrong? One weekend should’ve been enough to prove the project’s simplicity. And that supposed to be followed by few months tops of work adding content, polishing and publishing as well. With clear goal it was time to think about what the game supposed to be about. That was even easier as I’ve simply reused something from my library. The idea of the game was simple – a Robot Unicorn Attack but with free movement. There is a slight problem however – Robot Unicorn Attack’s whole concept is based around the fact that player always moves and moves faster overtime on top of that to make the game harder. You can never stop the movement like in that film where the bus cannot stop or it will explode. In short words – failure is inevitable. (just like with my projects? rofl) So something should give the player a reason to participate and what would be a better solution than a wave that will trigger game over? Something probably… But not for this game hence the name Fatal Wave. In form of preparation for the project I’ve done one of the Brackeys tutorials to not only be a little bit more familiar with the engine itself but have some temporary assets ready to use. Even if it is slightly outdated it is still a very good piece of content – highly recommend it. I’ve waited for something around a week before starting the work and before the day zero came by I decided to actually record myself with livesplit to record the time. Two birds with one stone, not only work but create content around it. Hit recording button, started the timer and started working. Spoiler alert I’ve never finished editing the video and truth be told I “lost” the source files. A lot of the tasks were similar to the tutorial, but I also added:

• procedural generation of the terrain that player was traversing through used with the simple node based system that were spawned from the pool when the player entered trigger
• some issues with the generation to fix that made it overall longer than expected
• wave mechanic that triggered game over
• health system to make wave mechanic a little bit more forgiving
• respawning after the fall
• finally a timer to give any reason to play the game

With that technically, the game’s core was ready — but truth be told, it was boring. The problem to solve for future me… quite far in the future in fact as I got a quick job offer for two weeks and couldn’t work as much on the game as wanted to. That started a pattern that would repeat for months. Got back to the project for some time -> wasted few days to even get going -> got the next offer for week or two -> back to step one. Because of the slow starts, my energy drained quickly. Progress stalled, motivation dropped — and the cleanup phase dragged on forever. I feel like I’ve done quite a lot: – learnt some limitations of Godot and the fact that it likes to drop references to files if you change their directory which was kind of annoying – hunted for some free assets on the internet – changed sprites – setup parallax background which was very clunky to setup actually – added modes for the wave to make the game pacing more natural with some breathing room – added some simple combat with one enemy (and plans for more) – added simple AI and reworked it like two times – added some music But the more I worked on it, the less I wanted to touch it. Not because of laziness — but because forcing myself to push forward became physically and emotionally draining. By then, interruptions and burnout had piled up. The culmination of that was my few days visit in hospital followed by webdev course. And on that very course I’ve thought it was a time to create my own website finally – the one that you read this post on. That’s why I’ve decided to suspend the Fatal Wave project. What does that mean? It’s not dead. I might return to it here and there. Maybe I’ll even finish it one day if I see light at the end of the tunnel. But for now, I want to work on things I actually want to build – like this site. So… did I fail? Not really.

• I never really built up any public interest, and even friends were skeptical at best
• I learned a lot. Not just about Godot, but about how I work, how I burn out, and how to recognize it.
• I left my comfort zone in a massive way — which ended up helping me at work too.

What killed me was reworking the same systems over and over. Even when they finally worked, the spark was already gone. Fatal Wave became a cycle of breaking, fixing, redesigning, and that just wasn’t fun anymore. So yeah – another project thrown into the drawer. Not the first, not the last. You can download the latest publish version from itch.io page. Failure is only part of the learning process. The only true failure is not trying at all. By the way, that bus film is called Speed — here’s the link. Cheers!