babygamedevsteps

[babygamedevsteps]

So, it’s 2:30 am and I should be sleeping soon, but I thought of going though what the plan is for the game that I have. It’s a game that involves challenging NPCs to “tests of luck”, and your equipment can alter the chances of your success or failure, or perhaps the rewards you get. There is no combat whatsoever, because that’s gonna take a long time and the idea is to *finish a game*

Now, what should we go for, first? Here’s what I’m thinking:

1) Focus on movement of character, and then 2) Establish interaction with objects, leading to 3) a dialogue/event happening.

I’m not gonna think about the rest first, I think I’ll just be happy with these three things first, and then evaluate our next move from there.

Art? I am just thinking of a casino motif, where the portraits of characters could be in playing cards, or maybe we have characters represented in the world as “chips” or something. I can do some art, I just need to keep it simple and, most importantly, “nice enough for me to not get annoyed at the project.”

Program? I’d really like to work on Unity. I have some experience with the engine, even though it is pretty rudimentary. This is only going to be on PC so we shouldn’t even think of doing touch stuff. As far as I’m concerned our controls are up/down/left/right/enter/backspace.

Any timeline for this? I should have some kind of timeline for this. Perhaps in 4 man-hours (split into 2 days?) we can do this within a week. I might stream it, actually. But let’s see where this goes for now.

[babygamedevsteps]

First Post!

So, I resolved to actually sit down and make some headway into programming. I know how to program, technically, what with having a pretty good hand in it in high school, and the numerous programs that I’ve had to write in my Physics degree. My first impression is that this shouldn’t be too hard.

But game projects are significantly (statistics-wise) harder than just a program that calculates the function at whatever argument. Game projects are a full package that is multi-media while my physics programs just need to output a number (or an array of them). I know this because I tried, and I did kinda get there. Almost. But I lost interest due to a number of factors, and it was already on its fifth iteration, at least.

After a horrible year of failure (2020) I looked into game programming as one of my career paths, and honestly maybe I should be getting into a job first, but I’m a bit afraid that they’ll look at a mid-20 year old with a half-way Master’s degree with no “actual” programming background or portfolio to show, and just say there’s nothing for me there.

So I want to kind of chronicle the first game I’ll make here, with some tips that I got from a friend who was half-way through game development as a course, which was to “split a game into its barest mechanics and make sure that you’re satisfied with each of them.” It sounds obvious but I do have a penchant of not finishing anything that contains anything that even irks me a little bit. So I’ll take this to heart and craft each code with at least some polish that I’m happy with. I’ll then post them here so I don’t get lost in my own sauce lol

For now I wanna just talk briefly about the scope of the game I wanna make. A friend turned me to Helltaker, which was a puzzle game that’s pretty short (I finished the main game in 60 minutes so...), but it has an immaculate level of polish that probably takes a lot more time that it might seem. My first “actual” game is probably going to be shorter than that, but hey: baby steps!