Am I in over my head starting with this project?

Hey I have a project I've wanted to do for a long time. There's like 10 or so projects I've wanted to do for a long time, but I've been reluctant to get into Unity because I've been using Game Maker since I was like 8, and because I'm below average when it comes to coding in general. With this post I'm going to give you my background and different things I'm trying to accomplish with this project and I'm hoping that with y'all's experience with Unity you can tell me if this is a viable goal or if this is like that one kid saying "Hey I want to make an MMORPG for my first game!" I've only screwed around with the demo that came with Unity, and it seems like there are a lot of built-in capabilities for what I'm trying to accomplish. Will plan on doing some tutorials before getting right into this, I'm more asking in general if this is a feat for someone who has been experienced in Unity for years or if I can handle this with general Computer Science and game design experience.

My background:
-Degree in Computer Science (passed by the skin of my teeth)
-proficient in Java and Javascript
-decent in C
-Very experienced with Game Maker (been using it since I was a kid)
-Mastery in GML
-Never touched C# or C++ but I've heard that once you've learned a few languages that picking up a new one is easy and that C++ and C# are similar to Java.

What I want to accomplish:
-A very visual first-person puzzle solving type of game, similar to Amnesia
-High emphasis on visual effects (motion blur, flashing images, forcing first-person camera direction, lighting, dynamic textures such as glass and computer screens)
-High emphasis on visual screwery, like using "portals" to create rooms bigger on the inside than the outside, or creating hallways to seemlessly connect back to the way you started. This short video gives a good example what I mean

-High emphasis on using mirrors to reflect objects and rigid humanoid objects. Many puzzles in the game will be based on mirrors.
-Low level graphics- mostly tile and hallways, low poly graphics
-Animation of humanoid movement (mostly walking). Planning on having a lot of dialogue but any facial jaw animation will be avoided by everyone wearing masks over their face.
-First person hand animations, or at least the ability to grab and manipulate objects in a Half-Life 2 sort of way.

 

First, welcome!

Not an important point, but I'd encourage you to change your thinking on this. The 'average' person has absolutely zero experience in coding, so you're far more advanced than average. And even if you weren't, not being experienced in something is a terrible reason for not trying to do it! How else are you supposed to gain experience in that thing?!

So as far as your game idea goes... yeah, it's probably a lot to take on for your first game. But who cares! You've got experience working with game engines and code, so why not give it a shot? Worst case, you find out it's too much for you to handle at your current skill level, so you shelve it until you're ready to take it on.

What I would recommend, though, is that you define a minimum viable product that is the core element of your game. Then you put it on the stove and boil it down some more. Then you scrape the burn edges off and squeeze the juice out of it. What's left is the absolute bare essential of what your first build should be. It might only barely resemble a game. But if you find that core focus and keep the game playable the entire life of its development cycle, it'll do a number of things. It'll keep you focused on Finding The Fun™, it'll keep you agile and, ostensibly, ready to ship whenever you're done adding new things, and it'll give you an early impression if the vertical slice of your game to determine if the idea is worth pursuing or viable.

If and when you run into Unity-specific issues, this forum or the dedicated topical forum for the subject (scripting, shaders, animation, etc) are great places to get assistance and feedback. Good luck, and don't forget to have fun with it!

 

Thanks for the kind words, but for the average programmer I'm below average. I've always found myself struggling with projects during my degree taking much longer than other students. One professor did a poll for the amount of hours taken to complete a project in two weeks, and there was a very skewed bell curve because the average amount took ~30 hours, some took in between 5 and 25 hours, and I was lone outlier on the very far right taking 50 hours to complete a two week project. This is after using Game Maker regularly since 8 years old. It's something I've come to accept. I make up for my lack of skill with experience and persistence. It's harder for me to pick up new concepts when it comes to coding as compared to the average programmer.

Sounds like a good strategy. I suppose at a minimum I should be able to manage text, audio cues, and walking around bare bones hallways.

I'm afraid most the fun will mostly be based around the cinematic effects. and advanced visual stuff A lot of the things I wanted to implement, like the puzzles involving advanced things like mirrors are a key part of what I want the game to be. If mirrors aren't implementable at a low level then that can take out a huge chunk of the game, some of it which multiple parts rely on very heavily.

It's good to know there's a supportive community.

I appreciate your well thought out and lengthy reply filled with encouragement. I'm very much looking for feedback on the specific concepts I outlined and how difficult they as a whole (or which specific ones) are in terms of difficulty.

 

Well, you're more advanced than I do and to other users and devs too.
My profession is not that close to a programmer. But since my interest is really in coding and techs, I just started to learn it by myself. If it's your passion then nothing is impossible.

Yes, C# is very similar to Java. I started learning Java as I wanted to make apps for Android. Yet all that learnings where applied to Unity C#


Starting to use Unity is probably the same as how you start using Game Maker. Don't get overwhelmed by what you don't understand.

 

Well I stand by my statement: not being good at something is a terrible reason to not try doing it!

These two statements are cause for concern for me. Because what it essentially means is that the core gameplay of your game idea is... just sorta walking around. While that is the core loop in some modern games, it's a real gamble. The one that comes to mind for me is Pneuma: Breath of Life. I downloaded it as one of the free games of the month on Xbox, and couldn't play it for longer than 20 minutes before deleting it. There may have been an interesting game past the first 20 minutes, but I was unwilling to find it. The core gameplay of just walking around did not grab me, the visuals underwhelmed me, and the writing and voice acting annoyed me immensely.

Classic games tend to have a more actionable loop that can be boiled down to a single action or small set of actions. You don't have to fall into that category, but not doing so makes it harder to narrow down what your game really is. Trust me... I've started a number of games without a clear definition of what the gameplay is, and each one fell into a swamp of design cludgery that ended in them gathering dust in my BitBucket account.

If you enjoy podcasts, check out Game Design Zen. Its creator, @Gigiwoo is a member of these forums, and he's one of my gamedev role models. Also check out our Game Design subforum, if you haven't already. Again, I'm not saying your idea is bad or that you have to change it, but I'd highly recommend that if you boil your game down to its bare minimum, it should still resemble a game, and specifically, your game.

With all that said, you could always just cowboy it and go for broke with your vision. Others have done so and succeeded, despite being told by others it wouldn't work. You're the one behind the wheel here!

 

I don't think your reaction is uncommon. People don't play games to walk around or read text, they play for an experience, and like I said my game is going to be based mostly on the visual effects and the gameplay.

The basic mechanic which I think will be enjoyable will be interacting with the world in a way that excites and rewards the player- solving puzzles that don't work out visually and physically the way you'd expect. I don't anticipate that to be completely satisfied with story alone, so I'm asking which of the bulletpoints are going to be hard for a noob to implement. I've appreciated all the encouragement about a general "I'm discouraged about programming a game with high expectations." situation, but I'd really like specific a point by point opinion, e.g. "This will be difficult to implement- this will be surprisingly easy to implement- this one has a built in function for it actually, etc."

Without the mental screwery and cinematic effects I'm intending to implement there's not much of a game. I've put a lot of thought into the puzzles, and they all should be very interesting if I can implement them, but I'm trying to gauge which mechanics are something I can handle. If it's like you say where wholesale the player interacting with the environment grabbing objects in a Half-Life 2 sort of style, portals and non-euclidean geometry, and mirrors are all way over my head and impossible, the game that I program simply won't be the game I'm trying to make. All puzzles will be replaced with basic things that won't make you wrap your mind in a different way, or at least not visually in the way I intend. All dramatic and cinematic effect is taken out entirely making the story very bland essentially like reading it from a book. At it's minimum it's not an impressive game or a game it would be worth putting time into. The game is ambitious, I know, I'm trying to gauge how ambitious it is. If pretty much all of the bulletpoints are simply out of the question for someone inexperienced with Unity, I'd be better set working on a different project and maybe revisiting it in a few years when I've gotten my bearings with other projects, or maybe in a few months- I don't know, that's what I'm trying to gauge.

 

Gotcha. Sorry I didn't address the points you were aiming for!

I've not implemented any kind of system like what you're describing, so I can't speak directly to the difficulty of things like portals and non-euclidean geometry. Not that I'd be able to speak to how difficult you would find it even if I had. What I can say, though, is that I'm fairly certain it will require a lot of custom scripting.

The best way you can tell if what you want to do is feasible is to build a bunch of tech demos. Use the Unity's standard asset FPS controller and some bare bones level geometry to create test specific aspects of your puzzles and mechanics. Once you create a mirror or portal once, you've pretty much got it figured out for anywhere else you need it.

There are tutorials available for almost everything, including portals, it seems. Or, if you'd rather not understand how the code works, there are assets available for purchase, too. If you're serious about making your game, don't let the cost of assets discourage you; if you value your time, the cost of almost any asset on the store is cheaper than the time you'd spend yourself. Then again, there's a very real benefit to writing everything yourself and having it just how you want it, too.

 

That's wonderful and very encouraging. That was one of the things I was most worried about. I'm sure with my coding background I can meander the visual parts of those into mirrors.

I hadn't really thought about the assets cost until you mentioned it. You're right assets are certainly worth their cost when time is money.

I'll have to look more into the visual effects parts and everything (and first person animations), but being able to use portals for non-euclidean geometry and being able to make mirrors by following a half hour tutorial, I don't expect those to be too hard.

 

Hey, welcome.. Good luck and have fun with your project

 

Quick update on my thoughts on this game idea... Oddly enough, one of the free Xbox games for this month is The Turing Test, which I didn't know until a few hours in, but is also made by the same team (or part of the same, at least) as Pneuma, which I despised.

It's even pretty similar in gameplay: you walk around solve fairly easy -- yet interesting -- puzzles. While Turing also has a little tool that lets you effectively toggle switches from a distance, the core mechanic of walking around and moving from room to room is the same. And yet I enjoy it so much more than Pneuma, and I think this is why:

• Setting - The Sci-Fi setting is far more compelling to me than the Greek god suggestions of Pneuma. This is clearly a matter of preference, but it's worth noting that the same puzzles in a different "theme" may not have interested me as much.
• Environment - The graphics in Pneuma weren't bad, but the environments were boring compared to the detailed levels of Turing. In any case, achieving the level of graphical quality of either game would not be an easy task for a solo developer.
• Tone - Pneuma attempted humor (I think) and failed at it. Turing keeps a straighter face, and the accompanying music makes it work very well. That's not to say humor can't work (Hello, Portal!) but if you're gonna do it, you better nail it.
• Writing - Turing is admittedly a bit heavy-handed with the writing, but it's way better than Pneuma, and I find the core premise itself an interesting one. I fully expect there to be a "big plot twist" coming up that I spotted from 5 minutes into the game, but I'm still motivated to move forward and find out if I was right.
• The Puzzles - In Pneuma, one of the early "puzzles" was just literally crossing a gap between two platforms. There was nothing there, but as you approached, platforms would come flying in under your feet. That's not a puzzle, it's a graphic effect. The very second room in Turing had me stumped for a bit until I grasped the game's rule set, but the rest have been mostly simple to solve since then. Even still, each one has involved solving something, still, and not just moving forward and letting the game do something for me.

- - -

So. Back to your game idea, @Newfa_Games. Make the tech demos showing the mechanics you have in mind work. Build the puzzles and make each one fun on its own. And then spend ten times the amount of time and effort working on setting, style, and story. If you nail all of that, I think you could have a good game on your hands.

Keep us updated!

 

+1 to @Schneider21's idea here. Spot on.

Gigi

 

Download Unity and go. If you can't do that, don't do that. What on earth makes you think the forums are anywhere near qualified to judge you?