Hey There!

It’s the 18th of september and you’re reading Dev Journey #9 by Jay

Last week I talked about how I canceled my latest project because it wasn’t serving any purpose although it was finished properly.
This Week I’ll be talking about my new project and the importance of adding objective complexity to your web project.

I will start by informing you that I’m an indie game developer aside from being a web developer that uses Django framework. I have developed 5 mini-games all platformer based (the same template of the old Super Mario game series). I have also been working with Django and creating web projects for almost 4 months now.

In my new project I decided to unify the best of both worlds. I have always been inclined towards puzzle games and the idea of challenging the human brain in order to make it think outside of the box.

You can find this theme even in my first ever game where I made the main goal of the game is to remember parts of conversations that narrates a story throughout the game.
But, how can I bring the realm of web development into the game sector of our industry?
The answer lies within one game that I have played not long ago. The game name is spent.

Spent is a game that put you in the shoes of someone who is living paycheck to paycheck.
And it’s only available online.
I took that concept and merged in my own way with the most famous newspaper game – crosswords – and came up with a game with an infinite amount of levels. You may ask me how, right?

Well, let me introduce you to “Guess”!

_Guess _is literally as the name tells, a guessing game. With each level you’re faced with some sort of a riddle with a couple of hints to answer the question that is asked. And once you finish all the levels of the game you can add your own level, yes, your own riddle that all players are going to try and answer and that they will have to answer in order for them to finish the game if they played it after you.

I already started working on some simple sketches and designs for the game, the game will only be available on the official website of the game. You will be able to create an account to track your progress and enjoy other people’s riddles. Hopefully the project will be ready in the next 10 days.

Now, I wanna talk about objective complexity, and I said “objective” because we all know how unnecessary complex stuff is an instant turn off for both the gaming and web development communities. When you add a complicated feature that serves a purpose to your project it seems clever and playful unlike when you add it only for the sake of it.
Because, when that happens, people start to receive your project as nerdy and not-so-cool.

A good example of objective complexity is the adding-levels feature in the my new project, the process of approving a riddle that is written by a user will be a pain in the … and I can say that before even starting working on the backend of the project, but whenever I bring the idea to someone in my life they seem to be interested and looking up to how this will work and how will it look, and that is because they have never heard of something like it before and that it’ll give them the opportunity to do the one thing that humans crave the most, it’ll give them the ability to CREATE.

So as a tip for this week, I’d recommend you to go build something awesome and add a layer of complexity that will make the fun more fun. And make people fall in love with your creation as a product developer.

Thanks for reading, have a great week.