January 1, 2014 – SwiftThought

The time to do this game has come. So it’s gonna be done right. No more Torque2D, Slick, or other homegrown from the ground, unproven frameworks. Time to do it in something that’s got support, community, a track record and a workflow. Aka Unity. And while we’re at it, let’s make it 3D, physics enabled and extensible by the user to add new rooms to the pool of maze chambers.

And let’s do it as part of this year’s OneGameAMonth Challenge to keep focused.

Oh and a list… let’s do a milestone list:

Milestone 1 – Single Room – boxes
- Generate Room From Map File
- Player Spawns
- Move Player
- Player Shoots
- Monsters spawn in increasing waves
- Monsters Move toward player
- Monsters Kill player
- Shots Kill Monsters
- Monsters Drop Items (coins for now)
Milestone 2 – Maze Generation, Enemy Waves, alt fire
- Basic level editor
- Single path maze generated
- Rooms have a level and determine waves spawned.
Milestone 3 – Powerups and Loot
- Player attributes, health (shields?), Speed, Damage, Rate of Fire, second power manna
Milestone 4 – A wizard
Milestone 5 – Creatures – ? Alpha ?
Milestone 6 – Menu and Starting area
Milestone 7 – Decor and Juicify
Milestone 8 – More Monsters
Milestone 9 – Music and Sound
Milestone 10 – Weapons and Karma unlockables framework
Milestone 11 – Title Screen, High Score – Names of the dead?
Milestone 12 – Beautification of textures and new textures/models for deeper levels?

So 2013 by all accounts was a pretty good year.

I managed to get 4 games made. 3 of them nice enough to show to the world,

Android development with libGDX and Spriter, IAP, and in Game ads.

Then I touched Unity, and having spent 11 months doing low level things it’s starting to grow on me. I still have ‘trust’ issues with letting the engine decide how to render things, but it seems to be doing everything I can throw at it.

OneGameAMonth was a success as well, the focus on small things really helped figure out what can be accomplished in a month.

In fact I’d say that that was probably the best takeaway that I learned in 2013.

A month, is not a lot of time. Add in an active family to help raise (play with), freelance work, and a very full time job and I can measure game development in hours per week. So the games I actually finished in a month were actually in the 40-50hr range, so a LD48 game a month essentially.

I’m pretty proud of Candy Goblin and War Mages, they’re pretty entertaining, but I really think that they could use another 6 months of polish to make them good. War Mages might get that at some point, but really, if I only get 400hrs (optimistically) of development time a year, spending them on a project I’m not REALLY excited to be making feels wasteful. So It’s time for a bit of focus and revisit something that I’m excited to create!

Luckily in 2014 1GAM has expanded to where playable milestones qualify, which leads me to the next post 🙂