The Production Blog of Sword 'N' Board
 
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It's been a long time coming for me, about 7 months to be exact. When I started work on Sword 'N' Board, I could always see what I wanted it to be, but it never quite felt like it was there yet, it was never really "fun" to me. 
I would sit down and test it, and I would run around the little world that I had created and fight the little creatures I had thrown in to test the game and simply go through the motions. 
All I could see at the time was all the things I wanted to add, the things I wanted to adjust or other issues. I would see issues with collision that needed to be fixed, little graphical adjustments that needed to be added or general game play mechanics that I needed to reprogram and because of this I wasn't really able to look at it as a "player" despite desperately wanting to. 

When designing a game, its important to try and look at it from the players perspective. Just because you, the designer, know how this is suppose to work, doesn't mean the person that comes along your game is going to know what's going on so you really need to be good about looking at things from a completely different perspective. 

Unfortunately for me, for the longest time I was too wrapped up in things that needed to be changed or worked on to really enjoy anything that I had put together. The thing that kept me moving forward was because I was seeing progress and I was seeing what things COULD be. Because what it currently was still had so much wrong with it, at least to me it did. 

Tonight, I got the shops working, or at least the functionality working. Sure, I still need to design other bubbles for other items, and program their logic, but its just a matter of repeating what I've already managed to do for different items, so the worst is behind me now. 
But, it was that one thing that really gave me a reward, and an objective for the game outside of the basic dungeon crawling aspect, and that 1 thing changed everything for me. 
I have been so hard working on polishing the game, that the bugs are few and far between now. There are still things that need to be added currently, but for the most part I'm happy with things and able to look past them. So now, with those things put mostly to bed, and the shops working I was finally able to sit down with the game and really enjoyed what it was that I was doing and finally really got excited!

It's a strange milestone to reach, and not one I ever really thought about before. It seems this journey is starting to write itself... and I can't wait to see where it goes.