Brother and I want to start. Workflow tip?

Hi guys,

My brother and I are new to game making. However, I have coding experience and all the tutorials I've watched so far for the C# (I'm familiar with the language), I understand. I don't feel that the coding in the beginner stages will be hard for me to grasp since I know these concepts (so far at least).

My brother doesn't know coding, but I was thinking he would learn the modeling and animation part of the game and construct those pieces.

Is this a good workflow for a 2 person indie game?

Also, one other question: I read that Unity isn't that good for building and animating models. Should we use something else such as Blender to do the modeling and animating? I guess what I'm asking is, is it typical to use a different program for the modeling.

Thanks!
Dave

 

Yes, it sounds like you and your brother will make a well-balanced team.

And yes, you generally don't do modeling in Unity (though if you want to try, check out this). A lot of people use Blender because it is free. If you have a Mac, I recommend Cheetah3d, which is not free but has a UI that doesn't make me go insane.

Or you could start with a 2D game, and make artwork in your favorite paint program. Or make use of some of the tons of great free stuff over at OpenGameArt.org.

 

Thank you for replying. That is very good to hear! I want to do 3d instead of 2d because of the convenience of changing things easily , like camera and lighting. I feel that 2D will be limited in that, once we get the art, we have to re-shade or re-perspective it if we decide to change something simple such as the distance of camera to the player or something. Plus we would have to maybe do things like blur background elements manually? I might be wrong in what I'm saying, but in general from my understanding, 3d projects will give a lot more option for changes.

I would also like to ask, if we wanted to have a group of friends working together, what is the workflow breakdown? For example, 1 guy does programming, 1 guy does modeling and animation, what can the 3rd friend do? Or the 4th friend?

What kind of skills can we all independently learn and bring to the table as a team effort?

(by the way, we want to make a 2.5D game (platformerish) with only X and Y movement, but with Z depth where some things can move in Z space.)

Thank you!!

 

Unity isn't really designed for this task. Think of Unity as the glue that holds all of your assets together. It's where you arrange them all into a cohesive level and present them to your player. But you don't actually make any assets in Unity.

In a rough order of importance (highly game dependent):

• Programming
• Art
• Design
• Sound
• Business

It's also worth noting that you can break down each of those tasks into smaller ones that different people can work on. The last four person team I was on was broken down like this:

1. Programmer A. Built the character controllers and most of the player driven systems. Also did animation when our artists where overworked
2. Programmer B. Built the NPC controllers and their systems. Also responsible for intergrating art into the engine
3. Artist A. Did all of the environments and background work
4. Artist B. All of the characters and animations.

Game design was shared across the whole team. Sound was outsourced to another team. Business was ignored.

 

Hey I appreciate the time you took to reply. Very helpful indeed.

"Business was ignored." hahaha, had a good laugh when I read that.

 

0.02:

Keep in mind that many artist roles can benefit from learning a little bit of programming. Especially for audio and animation, it really helps for the lead artists to have a reasonably intimate idea of what your engine is capable of. Encourage your brother to learn a bit about how Mecanim, shaders, and rendering works in Unity.

Unity works in a way that allows devs to be specialized in some features and totally ignorant in others, where usually the programmers are the ones to tie the roles together or otherwise fill in the gaps in experience, in addition to their normal roles writing behavior scripts, etc.

Some examples:

-When level designers and scenery artists work together to put a scene together, it really helps if these devs can write their own editor scripts for building levels. Knowing how to write scripts that can change properties of rendering components at runtime will give them more insight to how their graphics will look in-game.

-Audio designers should know how Unity's mixer audio works and how scripts interact with it, in addition to making audio outside of Unity. If they can place audio into a scene and modulate effects, settings, and so on with scripting, the will know exactly what their audio will sound like, and can speed up the design process for the audio.

Roles can check implementation and sniff out problems without having to go through the programmers each time. Even for a 2-person team, this will help you!

 

Hey thanks for that response. Helpful!

 

Start small! The biggest mistake aspiring game developers make is comparing what they make to what's in the market. It's better stated here.

Gigi

 

Yep, heard that we need to not expect to make an AAA game. Totally get it.

 

If you are a beginner you should not do 3d game. 3d is at least 10x harder to handle well than 2d. When you look at Steam you will notice that large majority of FINISHED indie games are 2d. You will have enough problems with a 2d game.

 

I have to disagree with the "completely avoid hard 3D" argument, because if you use something like MagicaVoxel and stick to basic gameplay (or even 2.5D gameplay) then it can be just the same amount of work and effort.

Like, a FPS in 3D vrs a side scroller shooter, yeah the 2D gameplay is easier to code... that is true.

 

Someone once told me to not quit my day job. Good thing I didn't listen. Now I make music for a living. While I appreciate your intention, I simply disagree.

 

As somebody who has and still does development with relatives, I'd advise coming to an agreement on who gets the final say on which subject, as it can be difficult when one member is really excited about an idea, and the other member doesn't think it will work.

 

Dave, working with family and friends is a hard thing to do. You can make choices for yourself and push yourself and force yourself to do something, but you cannot do that with family.

You'll probably have better luck just learning game art development, animation, and other various aspects you need. And if your family sees your work and gets excited and want to get involved then you can rely on them.

More related to your question though:

I would recommend using whatever software package for modeling that you can find a tutorial for. It depends on what you want to pay for your education and licensing rights.

That said, Blender is probably the way to go seeing as its free on various levels. There are also a lot of tutorials on digitaltutors, udemy, and YouTube.

Even if you have someone to do animating and game art, as a Project Manager, you'd benefit from knowing what your Developers workflows are like. Watch everything on DigitalTutors (for example) and you should have a better idea on how a game comes together.

It seems you are in the very early stages of educating yourself and I'd recommend you spend a lot of time just studying tutorials, play games on steam, and do a lot of homework.

When you are confident, try making a game.