Today’s entry will not be standard format, it will ramble a bit as I set out what I’ve done so far and what I’m planning to do next.
I’m settling into how I’ll actually write daily posts so this is kind of a continuation of my previous post more than anything.
Quickly I’ll cover what I’ve done
Decided on concept and game flow for first 20 minutes(ish) of the game
Created a Godot project and a main scene you can move around the “world” / zoom in and out.
Started making artwork to be used in the game.
So not a whole bunch but it’s about 2 weeks into the project.
Let’s cover some of the decisions I’ve made:
Game Engine
I have a secret about the Godot Engine I’ll share one day. But it’s not the reason I choose to use it. The main reason, weirdly, is that it’s quick to open!
I’ve not used Unity for a minute now, but my memories are always that I was super keen to do some development, then in the 10 minutes it would take to actually open the development environment my enthusiasm plummeted.
Plus in my opinion, for 2D especially, Godot is currently the king of engines.
Art Style
I need to develop my own ways of doing game art.
Do you know what the worst thing about Unity is, in my opinion? The asset store.
No, no I know, a lot of people say it’s one of Unity’s strengths, and I’m sure other people are very good at keeping track of placeholder assets and replacing them later on (also I never got the hang of proper project management in unity so importing assets just got messier and messier).
But I’m not good with using other people’s assets. So I am digging my heals in. I shall create everything, and it shall be good.
In brief, I’m learning how to do Pixel Art style graphics. Much more on this later.
Music
Traditionally I’ve used Renoise with a bunch of VSTs for music production when making game soundtracks.
However!
I’m thinking I may deviate from this and use a MIDI based approach with Ableton for this game.
I have a theme half written, but I’m not going to worry too much about this at the moment. I could probably belt out a sound track in a couple of days if I was rushed (although not in the daily 1 hour timeslot I’ve assigned myself to make this in!)
Game Concept
Ok this is where it might get a bit more interesting. I based a lot of my thinking on how Tower Wizard works, but I also remember some really interesting clicker games and incremental games I’ve played in the past. Some of which I can’t find to reference by name now, but for instance:
There was a game on Kongregate or Newgrounds that was about getting into space by building a rocket and then flying it through the sky, stratosphere then space (and then also mars as I recall) but you could also collect things. I like the idea of actions to speed up production, but also that you could leave the game idle.
Paperclip factory - this, as I recall, was it’s own self contained website where you built a paperclip factory but you started off by making the paperclips by hand (or by clicking a button!) and then you could add automation with some choice on what automation to add.
Another flash game I recall was similar to the spaceship game but featured flying penguins. The goal was to allow the penguin to fly as far as possible to the right of the screen. You started off just with the penguin but then you could add wings, rocket boosters (eventually). I had to stop playing that because I recall the Javascript in adverts on the site annoyed my virus checker so I never went back to it.
Factory builder games like Factorio and Satisfactory! Although this will be nowhere near to those in complexity I like the sense of progress and of setting up automation. So I wondered if there was a way I could allow players to setup systems (more simplistically) in this game.
Ok so with that in mind I drew a concept picture!
Sharp eyed readers may noticed that this is in my awesome new Sonic The Hedgehog notebook.
I think this is the best impression of the game I can give at this point. I’ll probably change the floors around a bit and maybe not start with a wooden base.
That’s it for today, the plan tomorrow is to share some images of where I’ve gotten to!