joshsthgameblog

[joshsthgameblog]

Game Blog #1

Hi! My name is Joshua and this is my blog about our game, Stairway to heaven, a roguelike tower climber game.

These past few weeks have been pre-production on the project! Although not much coding progress was made on my part, it felt very good to get all of the planning out of the way before getting into the nitty-gritty coding. I got lots of work done on the GDD, and we had lots of good inspirations to get down on paper. 

I find that the easiest way to describe a game is to compare it to other games and add an adjective, e.g “Hades is like enter the gungeon combined with god of war” I think stairway to heaven is going to be like dead cells combined with hollow knight, which sounds lots of fun… even though i haven’t really played either of those games. Anyways, aside from the GDD, I also got my TDD done. This was…less fun, but it’s still very important work. My TDD was on saving and loading, which will be important due to the planned length of our game.

Still, at least making the flowchart and UML diagrams were fun! Actually feels pretty good to lay everything out in a visual way.

It looks dry, I know, but these will be very important later on when I’m actually trying to implement these systems.

Collaborating with my teammates is lots of fun! Working with others towards a collective goal is something I already enjoy, but combining it with game development is even better. It was very interesting to be taught how to use github by another member, and it seems he’s very experienced with it! Having him teach me all of the ins and outs of github was very interesting, it’s very nice to be taught by somebody with lots of experience. However, the biggest collaboration we’ve had so far was when we all worked on the GDD together. That was lots of fun! We all discussed certain parts of the game, found reference images, as well as writing down our thoughts in general. It reminded me of doing it last year, except a little more thought out due to our experience. I also loved helping another group member write characters! At one point, I had an idea for a psychotic shop keeper character, and he had an idea for a calmer and more friendly one. So we both wrote the shopkeepers in, one sells weapons and the other sells healing items (guess which) and both of them are by far my favourite part of the game so far! They seem like they’ll bounce off each other really well. The final time i’ll recount is when me and all of the members had a meeting about if the game will have lives or not. It seems small, but it was the first time we all came together in person to decide on something. It’s very interesting hearing everybody’s perspective on how a game mechanic will affect what they will do! I loved every discussion we had, really. That’s it for now, I’ll be back in another two weeks with more!