Day: 324:1 Yay!Nay!Fail!Again!

Here’s the breakdown of what has been happening with my game project.

At some point long ago I successfully created my game mechanic. Yay.

After that point, I attempted to build many game plays and game ideas to use the mechanic. I found out many of my gameplay ideas didn’t work out, and many were hard to build. That was rather discouraging. This is an obvious statement, but when there’s no clear direction of where to go for development. Everything slows to a crawl. On top of that came along the holidays and preparing for a whole lifestyle change. My game project began to collect dust.

Fast-forward to now. Holiday’s are over. Lifestyle change is still ongoing, but a little less hectic. I found time to work on game development again.

But I was still quite lost as to what I should do exactly, so many options I was thinking about. Then a chat with a fellow developer friend (@jmstout) happened. He gave me a simple attractive gameplay idea, with a little tweaking and going back and forth. I was pretty content with the idea, issues that my game mechanic caused other game play ideas no longer existed. It was time to get to work on actual game development.

A few hundred mental visualizations and scenario testings later and a very lazy sketch. I’m finally game developing again.

Here’s a sneak peak screen shot….Yes not appealing at all..and it’s only for me to understand and see what isn’t drawn. MUHAUHA. My mental visualization looks a lot better. Trust me?

It’s Day 324. But I feel like I’m starting all over again with a clear direction, so to make myself feel better about my failures. I’m saying It’s Day:324:1.

1 marking today as the first day of my gamedev for modified game vision.

Stay tuned as every now and then I procrastinate to write these blogs and tweet updates about my game development.

P.S I do realize, I have an audience of nearly zero. However, I like journalling my progress on my projects. My god my writing sucks.

 

 

Introduction

Who am I?

I am Kaji Atsushi, 23 years old, a nobody.

My skills are the following: Intermediate graphics, A rusty web developer, Basic skills in game development, Logic.

What’s this all about?

This blog will track my journey of becoming a Indie Game Developer(Hopefully…). I’ll be making weekly~ updates.

My goal is to find success in being a indie game developer. How I will end up is yet to be seen, It may end in failure, or success. Either way, I’ll be sharing all my struggles and choices along the way, and hopefully this can be a guideline to new developers like me as to know what to do, or not to do.  I’ll be trying to approach this as methodically and logically as possible. I believe there must be a general formula one can follow to succeed, of course as time progresses, that formula most probably must evolve and change. Luck may have a lot to do with a games success…but this blog is about how to succeed without luck (IM HOPING HERE)?

The task at hand is to create a successful mobile game, within a 3~ month time period.(FINGERS CROSSED).

Let the journey begin.

Day -5: Preparation for game crafting!

Tools

Tools…tools and tools. Every endeavor that needs to be done well requires good tools. Luckily, at this time and age for game development, tools are abundant and easy to use.

To develop a game you need, code, artwork, and sound.

Hardware Tools

I’m fortunately equipped with a 2014 Macbook Pro 15″. No, I don’t have dual/triple!/quadruple!?/quintuple!?!? screens like many other nifty serious indie devs. But this machine is very much capable of whatever I throw at it. I also have a bamboo wacom table from a couple years ago. Should come in handy from time to time.

Yes! making that decal for my computer made me feel cooler and more unique 8) Buhauha

So all you need to get started with lone game development is…a decent computer, internet, and maybe a drawing tablet.

Ah, I almost forgot!

You need to be able to test your game on some device. I have a shabby android phone that should do the trick

and an iPad if I ever end up releasing to iPad.

Software tools

Code

The game developing tools for mobile have become more abundant and easily accessible over the recent years. You have choices to go native, unreal, or with Unity! My choice is Unity. Why? Because, it first peaked my interest when I was first introduced to it…by playing crappy small Dashboard games. Fast-forward 3 or so short years later, it grew and evolved at a rapid speed, now becoming a very popular choice for game development, it’s capable of exporting to most platforms if not all. It’s interface and its workflow is very friendly and generally straight forward.

Artwork

I plan for simple, really simple art. So any artwork I produce will be limited in 2 dimension.

I have photoshop and illustrator, that there should handle any artwork that needs to be made.

Sound

I’m completely clueless in this area…I’ll look into this later when I’m nearing the end of my development…(Though that may turn out to be a bad idea). If worst comes to worse, I’ll just have to make voice all the sound effects and music. KABOOM, PHOOSH, ZING TING. Yeah…should sound fantastic.