I’ve decided to write about my game dev experience on my first game “Fucking 50 DKP Minus: Raiders of the Lost Content” (or DKP for short - title still WIP) to keep me honest & stay on track and to have a nice memory when I want to look back on that time that I made that one game. I’m planning on doing a Recap every 2 weeks and describe what progress I made. To keep my tasks and progress in order I started a Trello board - i guess hours of agile training do leave a mark… 😀
What’s the game? It’s an RTS focused on a small amount of units (5-10) with special abilities fighting interesting enemies, mainly bosses. There was a period where I was in a progress raid guild in WoW and the worst thing about raiding was watching people die in the fire. It’s a giant red thing on the ground - move away you idiot! So I thought: How about a game where you raid, but you control EVERYBODY. Of course you’d have to cut quite a bit but that’s the main idea. It’s probably going to end up feeling like a mix between the StarCraft 2 single player (the hero missions) and a MOBA but I want the boss fights to have a lot of unique mechanics. I’m gonna build it with unity because of it’s a very popular engine and there’s huge amounts of tutorials etc.
I have a lot of ideas for features like customization, leveling, skill trees, items, spell upgrades, a whole raid-guild-management layer on top of the normal gameplay, even multiplayer, … But that’s way in the future. Like “not even thinking about it” in the future. First I need a prototype. Maybe it turns out the gameplay isn’t fun and I should scrap the idea. So what’s the goal? 5 Heroes with each 4 unique abilities fighting 1 boss. I feel like that’s reasonable to achieve (especially considering my rate of progress so far without any Unity experience).
I’m not a story guy - I usually skip cut scenes. So don’t expect an amazing plot with twists and turns. The idea is: You are playing as an entire progress raid guild. You work hard to get world first kills. And like any hardcore MMORPG player out there, you run out of content very fast. So your guild starts raiding other universes. That’s basically my cheap story to allow me to make a lot of disconnected boss fights where the art styles don’t match. You can fight aliens in a realistic sci-fi setting and dragons in a cartoon fantasy world. The main reason is that I need to rely on the unity asset store for art. I bought the character models and some spell effects and I expect to spend more money so I’d love to be able to use as many free assets as possible. It also forces me to be creative and allow me to get crazy with the boss fights.
I’ll post a “State of the Game” soo - it’s one of my tasks for this sprint (which ends on the 8th of october). Besides the recaps I might post a few tutorials or How-Tos when I make something that I feel is worth writing down.