August 1, 2024 || Week 0 (July 25th - July 31st)
Project: FIRST GAME || Time remaining: 1 year
Goal: Finish a very small scope, simple game in one year and then release it to Steam.
How?
- Creative Exploration & Learning - 3 months <-- We are here
- Primary Development - 6 months
- Test and Bugfix - 3 months
- Release - Research and schedule a time for release plus additional testing and feedback.
Why did I write this? To keep myself accountable and have something to look back on for progress as well as reference point and resource for anyone on a similar journey.
Work Log 0
Time spent: ~2 hours
Progress: Basically none :(
Morale: High
1. Take a "vacation"
Okay so instead of starting the project, I actually spent time helping family out in the middle of nowhere. I achieved not dying from heat exposure, so there's that. If anyone actually reads this here is your reminder to go outside and get some fresh air as well as drink water!
2. Ideation
I spent some time generating ideas:
- Outer space exploration (limited) trying to get from point A to point B in a small corner of the universe. Your ship is broken and you need to get it back up to speed in order to get home. Gameplay - flying around and shooting at asteroids for materials, visit planets to buy or win parts/collectibles, tinker with the engine.
This one is too large. There are ways to limit what is needed here, but ultimately to make a reasonable quality game in this genre it's going to take longer than I have. There are so many massive games like this that gamer expectations for what is possible/presented will be high. I'm unlikely to be able to meet gamer expectations and while I may be able to finish a version of this game, it's unlikely to sell well or be marketable due to the quality of competition.
- Heist puzzle game. A evil goose mastermind convinces a gentle, friendly bull to pull of china shop heists for him. You get a cute little cutscene with the goose convincing the bull to do crime, and a series of puzzle levels which you can either solve with stealth or chaos (aka smashing everything and getting out before you get caught) then you get scored (by the goose, with the goose foot-stamp of approval or the honk of failure).
This may be achievable, but the quality of the puzzles will be important. The levels will need more variety or mechanics to make it interesting, and there is no driving goal for the player. It's possible the cutscenes are not important to gamers (who may just skip them anyway) or could be simplified. The real problem with this idea is I don't have a long-term goal for the player. Are we (the bull) trying to break free from the goose? Or perhaps as an agent of the goose we want to add to the goose's crew and increase the amount of money we're making? But then you can unlock different crew and you can choose which crew go on the job--but! If we add crew we start to get into a level of scope that's too large for the timeline. Each crew will need a host of art assets and possibly new animations, plus you would need to add a selection screen and now there are new combinations that will need to be play-tested adding to overall test and bug fixing time. This idea needs more work.
To sum up, we haven't gotten very far and are just messing around with ideas for now. Nothing has really stuck yet, but I'll start messing around in Unreal and find what feels fun.