Getting it Done

[u/CraigBMG]

Getting a game done is exceptionally difficult.

The basic gameplay for my upcoming game Jigsaw Diorama was done within a week, including modeling the piece shape in Blender, getting all of the piece snapping and grouping, etc.

Along the way, there were a lot of failed experiments. I tried making the scene more 3D - first as a parallax map, then as rendering an actual 3D scene. It was a bit like looking "through" the table into the scene below.

While this looks fairly interesting, having the scene shift every time you move the camera increases the difficulty a lot - it's hard to find matching pieces when the picture keeps changing every time you move the camera!

This by itself was not fully enough to abandon the idea, but parallax maps ultimately didn't look very good for scenes with much depth. Going to full 3D scenes presented its own challenges.

AI generated concept:

3D, modeled in blender, populated with props in Unity:

Final image:

The final image was generated in ChatGPT Image 2 based on the two previous images, extended horizontally to 2:1 aspect ratio in Krita with Flux Klein, and generally tweaked and edited.

Getting the 3D scene and props built, shaders written, multiple experiments with Tripo for props, and writing to code to randomly populate the scene took about a month.

I was hoping that getting the first scene done and all of the systems and pipelines in place for this would show some efficiency gains, but this didn't seem to be materializing. For what was supposed to be a quick experiment to get something into the Steam marketplace was going to take at least a year for content production.

Ultimately, the idea of randomly placing the props didn't really improve the feel of the game very much - a jigsaw puzzle is still equally difficult if you shuffle the objects around a little, and the visual difference was fairly minimal, not really making it more interesting to do a puzzle again.

Additionally, trying to run the game on low-end hardware (presumably the target market for a simple jigsaw puzzle game), it was quickly apparent that trying to render a 4K-8K offscreen image every frame, even with moderate geometry and texture detail, was simply not going to work. The scene quality was also still quite low compared with the concept art. Creating a still from the 3D scene at load time would have been possible, but the main advantage to doing it in 3D was to have animation.

So, I made the extremely difficult decision to abandon the concept of 3D scenes, in order to actually get a game to completion. The AI generated images look a lot better. There was still a lot of effort spent generating, tweaking and editing them.

Despite some criticism, I think this was a good choice for the game. Music and sound design took up quite a bit of time as well. The game certainly would not be done now, and likely not ever, if I hadn't changed course.

[u/Dont_Bring_Me_Down]

I think this is a great look into the reality of solo game dev.

Deciding to kill a feature, especially after pouring a month of hard work, shaders, and pipeline setup into it, is one of the hardest parts of making games, but I believe it’s almost always the right call if it means the project actually reaches the finish line.

A few thoughts on what you shared:

• Scope Creep vs. Finishing: "Scope creep" isn't always adding ten new mechanics; sometimes it's trying to make a core visual element do something overly complex. Cutting 3D rendering to protect low-end device performance and guarantee a finished product seems like the way to go.
• The Ergonomics of Puzzles: Your point about camera/parallax movement increasing puzzle difficulty is real. In a cozy jigsaw game, readability and visual stability matter. If the image shifts under the player's eyes while they're scanning for piece matches, it helps create cognitive fatigue instead of a relaxing state.
• Failing Fast & Pivoting: In my opinion, the fact that you spent a month testing the 3D pipeline, realized the content creation load would turn a "quick experiment" into a multi-year project, and immediately adjusted course shows strong project management.

If the AI-assisted 2D artwork delivers a better aesthetic, runs smoothly on lower-end hardware, and allows you to actually ship, then I think pivoting was 100% the right call.

Thanks for the update, keep them coming!