Exploring the game development world
First off, who am I?
I am young developer living in my birth country Venezuela. Since I was a child I always liked numbers and logic, looking to know how everything works and everything’s place in the enormous puzzle we call “reality”. As I grew up I got to know what programming is and realized it was my place, then I remember playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time on my Nintendo 64 and fell in love with that game, I was intrigued how such huge world could be created, where a lot of things happens: events, fights, quests; that was the biggest game I played as a child and I knew I wanted to do that, to create worlds where everything is possible, and then I learnt that programming was part of that creation, that’s when I met my calling. So I entered the University studying Computer Sciences with that goal. In the way I learnt a lot of my field and things I could do, but nothing took me away from my goal.
Sadly, in Venezuela there is too little presence of the video game industry, I’ve read about one or two small studios in the capital, but it’s far from home, so it was not an option. That’s why I decided to learn and develop by myself, by test, fail and learn. I’ve used some tools to do that, a little of XNA, DirectX, OpenGL and event pure C++ — once I made a Win32 window to draw lines given cube’s vertices passing through perspective matrices — .
That’s enough of me for now. Now, why am I writing this?
I’ve created small game mechanics or scenes, but now I want to got to the real place, creating a playable game. But there is a catch, if you have tried to create a game and look out for help, people will advise you to create just anything, no matter how simple it could be, the most simple game you can but you will have to finish it, they are right! If you want to create games, the best place to learn is in your IDE or engine, that’s where you will find the real problems to solve while you develop…. but… I will not follow this advise, I will create a big, maybe imposible to finish game where I expect to touch every single step of a game development and to learn different techniques and tricks to achieve different things.
So, answering the question, I invite you to join me in this “adventure” and learn with me some complex things we might find in the way.
But you are warned, do not consider this as a step by step tutorial, because as we will be exploring, we are going to fail a lot and refactor a lot of stuff as we learn, I am doing this in my spare time and I have no deadline to finish it, but I do have a game in mind, in fact, I have several weeks working on it, and I will start by sharing some stuff I’ve learn in the way. I might not share its name, story or details because who knows, maybe I manage to finish it and things get serious, hehe ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I will document everything in English because I want this to be open to everyone who can read it, and if you would like to traduce it to Spanish or another language, I’m pretty sure Google Translator or any other could easily translate from English to your language.
Enough introduction, lets begin
The game I want to create is a survival game, where the core challenge of it is precisely surviving. For example, one of my biggest inspiration for this game is Minecraft, I like a lot that game, the vast universe you have to explore, the huge amount of things you can do there and on top of that the mods you can add to it to get more crafting recipes, and machines! I love engineering with IndustrialCraft!
But, in my opinion, Minecraft is not that real survival game, because yes, when you start the game and are alone in the wild you’re scare to die and all that, but once you get some wood or dirt and build yourself a tiny comfortable house you are away from any harm, and there is no danger anymore unless you get out there, you get some seeds and make your farm and you will never starve anymore, that’s it, no more danger.
But still Minecraft is a huge inspiration for this game, so a lot of things will be inspired on it. There is another game I’m inspired but I’ll save it for later.
This game will be a low poly game (that means, graphics will be really simple), firstly because I am a really bad artist, and secondly because basic things tend to stimulate imagination, man I remember Yoshi Story, it made me see the whole world differently, and there are a lot of games like it that made me go beyond reality.
I will be using Unity as the game engine, there are a lot of blogs and videos discussing the best engines, their pros and cons, I like the most Unreal 4 and Unity, but I’ll stick to Unity now simply because it has lower system requirements than Unreal, that’s all.
At this time, I have little developed, basic functionality of a FPS game, a simple UI with Health, Water and Energy (Hunger) bar.
The main topic is survival, so it’s not a surprise we’ll have to keep track of our hunger and thirst to keep us alive. To keep your thirst at bay, player will count with a well where they can go and drink some water (as long as there is water left); for food, well… we will define different ways the player can find and harvest it. Don’t mind the white cube and capsule, they are there just to have a reference on sizes, and by the way, that well is not made by me, it’s available in the Asset Store, remember I’m a really bad artist.
Well, I think that’s enough for the introduction and first post. I don’t want to write lots of lines in a single post. Next time we will talk about the inventory system I’ve defined and what I’m currently getting my hands into, procedural terrain generation!
If you have any question or would like me to go deeper in any topic, don’t hesitate to leave your comment and I’ll just respond or prepare a post about it.