Game Dev Diary 1: The Plan
31 Jan 2017
I’ve always had a passion for creating games and over the years I’ve had various ideas, admittedly some better than others, though there’s been one idea that’s always stuck with me, one that I would really like to one day see materialised.
Unfortunately, I’m also terrible at making time to work on this hobby, usually only finding the time when taking part in game jams, which has meant that most of my previous attempts have failed.
So I’ve decided to start working on this project again, but this time to also keep a developer diary to help keep me focused.
The Game
The game I want to create is a real time strategy, probably because this is my favourite video game genre, though I’d like it to have role playing, simulation and even some storytelling elements to it as well. I won’t go into much much of the design details for now because at the moment it is all still in my head and instead I’ll introduce more and more as I go along.
Artwork
In many of my previous attempts to create this game I was plagued by being awful at game art; this had meant that any art I used in my game was either ‘programmer art’ or free assets, which both resulted in problems as the game developed. I thought about different options to get past this barrier, such as trying my hand at pixel art or looking for someone who could create the assets I need but in the end I decided that I would try to learn 3d modelling, since it’s something I’ve always wanted to learn and this would give me a good opportunity.
Engine
In one attempt to develop this game I came up with the idea of developing my own game engine in C++ based on SDL, a C++ API for 2d rendering. The intention was to develop the two hand in hand, however as I learnt how much work was involved in creating a game engine from scratch I found myself working solely on that, which despite being fun, was not supposed to be my main focus.
This lead me to the decision to use an existing game engine, so I started checking out what was on available, I looked into the Source SDK and Unreal Engine but in the end settled on Unity 3D.
I don’t have a lot of experience with any of these engines, though out of the three, I’ve spent more time with Unity, and this was one of the reasons I chose it. The other reasons were that Unity allows you to script in C# which I’ve also had a fair amount of experience with when developing in C# for XNA, back before support for it was dropped, and that I found that Unity had more in the way of tutorials available than the other engines.
Conclusion
So my plan is to post regular updates, with everything that I have been working on and any progress I’ve made as well as anything useful that I learnt along the way. I hope that you find this series interesting and that I’m able to provide some useful advice for anyone wishing to do this for themselves.
I am going to start by diving right into my Achilles’ heel by having a go at doing some 3d modelling in Blender, I’ll let you know how that went in my next post.