So, I’ve been meaning to talk about this little venture of mine, a project I started calling “Damned in Venice.” Sounds a bit over the top, I know, but trust me, the journey there felt pretty much like that sometimes.
The Spark
It all kicked off with this vision I had. You know Venice, right? The canals, those old buildings, the whole vibe. But I pictured it darker, a bit unsettling, not the usual sunny tourist trap. I thought, “Yeah, that could be a really atmospheric setting for a small game I wanted to try making.” Just a personal challenge, something to get my hands dirty with.
Getting Started (and Stumbling)
I decided to jump right in. First big question: what tools to use? I’d been hearing about this game engine, supposedly super user-friendly. “Great for beginners!” the internet screamed. Well, that was optimistic. I spent a good while just trying to figure out the basics, wrestling with an interface that felt anything but intuitive to me at the time.
Next up: actually building Venice. Or, you know, a tiny piece of it that looked like Venice. I’m no 3D modeling wizard, so I went hunting for assets. Figured I could cobble something together. That, my friends, was a whole saga on its own. I lost hours, maybe days, digging through online marketplaces. Most of what I found was either way too complicated for what I needed, looked completely out of place, or cost more than I was willing to spend on this experiment.
The Water Woes
And then there was the water. Oh, the water. Venice is pretty much defined by its canals. Getting that to look even halfway decent, and to act somewhat like water, without making my old computer choke? That was a special kind of nightmare. I remember trying a bunch of stuff:
- One shader I found made it look like shimmering blue plastic. Nope.
- Another one just tanked the performance so bad, it was unusable.
- I even looked at some fancy water systems, but they were either too complex for me to integrate or had a price tag that made my eyes water.
It felt like I was spending more time fighting with the water than building anything else. Frustrating is an understatement.
Code, Bugs, and More Frustration
When I finally got to the coding part, trying to get some basic gameplay working, my grand ideas of intricate puzzles and moody exploration quickly shrunk. My new goal became: “Can the character just walk around without glitching through the floor?” Often, the answer was a firm no.
Everything felt like an uphill battle. The lighting was never quite right, always too dark or weirdly flat. Getting the character to move smoothly felt like trying to navigate a bathtub on a stormy sea. And the bugs! Oh, the bugs. I’d fix one thing, and two more would just pop up out of nowhere. It was like whack-a-mole, but with lines of code.
There were days I genuinely considered just formatting my hard drive and pretending “Damned in Venice” never happened. The name started feeling less like a cool project title and more like an actual curse I’d somehow invoked.
So, What Now?
Where does “Damned in Venice” stand today? Well, it’s kind of… hibernating. I put it on the shelf. I had to step away before I really lost my mind over it. I haven’t deleted the files, not yet. Part of me still thinks I might go back to it someday, with fresh eyes and maybe a bit more patience.
But even if I don’t, this whole thing wasn’t a total waste. I learned a lot, mostly about what not to do, and how “easy” tools can still be incredibly difficult when you’re pushing them in a direction they don’t naturally want to go. I also learned that sometimes, the best thing you can do for a project, and for yourself, is to just walk away for a bit. Before you end up truly, utterly damned by it.
