I’ve started making my first video game. It’s about a little robot that sets out to find its inventor’s daughter after a tragic accident kills the inventor. With the inventor dead, the world is slowly fading away. The only way to restore the world is to deliver the inventor’s control device to the daughter.
The robot travels through various worlds in order to find the daughter. There are many hazards and obstacles along the way that the robot needs to overcome, if he’s to reach the daughter. He comes across characters and powers that help him out. He also comes across notes and artifacts that fill in background details regarding the inventor and the world. He ends up needing to make some decisions along the way that impact the outcome for the robot and the world.
The type of game is a platformer. From what I’ve read about other games, it seems like it falls into the “Metroidvania” genre, though I imagine most would consider it “Metroidvania-lite", if that’s a term. Since it’s my first game, I’m trying to keep it simpler than what I aspire to be able to do in future games. As a first step, if all I can do is create a game from beginning to end, I’ll consider this a success. I’m already becoming much more fluent in programming the different aspects of the game, as well as creating graphics and animations.
Speaking of programming, I’m using Unity as my game engine, because it seems to provide straightforward support for multiple platforms, it is relatively inexpensive and it seems to be well-supported by its community and third party developers. I’m also using the Corgi Engine on top of Unity, which has greatly accelerated my learning and creating. I recommend it to anyone who has never programmed a video game before and is looking to start with 2D platformers. It takes care of a lot of the lower-level logic that would be required for any platformer, which means I can focus on designing MY platformer instead of reinventing the digital wheel. Perhaps even more important than the code itself, the organization of the various assets has been awesome. Providing a framework in which to organize the different aspects of my game has been a huge help.
So far, I have a very rough prototype developed of the intro level. Since I’ve been spending most of my time learning, experimenting with code and establishing some of the fundamentals of the game, there isn’t much to SHOW for it. But it’s very exciting that I’ve only been doing this a month and most of the development progress has really been completed only in the last two weeks. As I become more fluent and establish certain patterns in the game, the progress should be faster and have higher quality. I’m also not focusing too much on graphics for now, since those can always be swapped out later.
I'll lightly polish up the prototype enough to be playable and share a version in the near future. Don't expect a "game" though - it is really a rough draft of a work in progress for the curious person. I'll also share some of the graphics soon.