Coming up with (how to cut) ideas
It's been a while since our last post, we have to confess we have been super busy. As mentioned in our previous post, Of crabs and processes, we were going to start with an ideation phase.
Our objectives for this phase were twofold, writing down a design doc (to be maintained and expanded during development) and building a prototype (to be thrown out, given the technical debt we had to push because of a mix of lack of knowledge of Unity and the need to get it out in very few days).
People playing video games sometimes fantasize about making their own game, and we definitely haven't been lacking in that regard. In a sense, the design doc has been more about cutting scope and defining what we can afford to develop and what we can't, along with discovering that when you write things down things start to get real, or, as Leslie Lamport would put it "Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is".
Anyway, done with the design doc, we wanted to take a look at how people were going to interact with what it is, most probably, our key mechanic. Despite our lack of Unity knowledge, we were able to put something out quite quickly, thanks to cranking the copilot and chatgpt dial up to the max and accepting levels of technical debt which interest was never going to be paid.
By now you must be thinking, alright, but what's the game doc? Well, the game narrative isn't really fully established yet, aside from the fact that it's about the journey of a fellowship of adventurers (no rings involved). When it comes to mechanics, we are going for turn-based battles with a twist to make skills more interesting and combo-ey.
Outside of battles, the group will walk around regions of the world, somewhat similar to how movement around the world was handled in Final Fantasy IX. When it comes to graphics we are thinking about mixing up 2.5HD graphics and pixel art, but that's really up in the air.
Here's a screenshot from our prototype, the colored squares are facing the big red square!
That's it! This post came out a bit longer than we expected, to conclude, we were able to get precious feedback from friends and family (or, at least, the video-game-playing side of it 😸), we'll aim higher by the end of the next phase. We are entering pre-production!
As always, feel free to subscribe :).
J&K