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From the start to the finish.

Discussion in 'Game Design' started by Deadly_fallout, Jul 17, 2018.

  1. Deadly_fallout

    Deadly_fallout

    Joined:
    Jul 17, 2018
    Posts:
    7
    Hello unity community!

    I am now 22 years old, I never really learned game development in any school or college but I am a gamer at heart.

    4 years ago I started learning C++, some modelling and animating but in the end I stayed with C++. 2 years ago I Discovered unity and C# and kept building up on that. I made some small games for myself where I just shoot up some zombies and all that kind of stuff. I learned how to use LODs, rendering and Vfx for no apparent reason. I never thought of creating my own games.

    I modded games like skyrim and Minecraft(I loved those to no end) but everything felt wrong, like something is missing. I wanted to create my own thing and not matter how I tried, my mod never felt like it belonged to me.

    So a few days ago I came to a conclusion, I had something in my head that I wanted to play all my life. A game that adds elements from my favourite games, but with my own touch built by me. While I loved a lot of games, there was always something missing. Skyrim was great, but it was to glitchy. Minecraft is great but even heavily modded it just misses a goal you want to accomplish. Witcher series is a masterwork, but it doesn't have a in depth crafting system like Skyrim does. Trove would be great, but it lacks content and is too much of a grind. Dark souls has a great fighting system, but it lacks in depth otherwise.

    The game I dream about is a mix of those. A cube based game with a real story like witcher, a fighting system like darksouls and monsterhunter. A crafting system like Skyrim.
    I don't want the world to be destructible, not everywhere. The landscape is what makes these open world games so immersive. Also while the map is large, I want it to be handcrafted, only using heightmaps to create the base and then carving out the details. Many games fail because there is no "Wow" moment in the game, nothing memorable even though it is infinite.

    Another very important thing for me is modding support. I want to add a system that lets players change core mechanics, create something they want without artificially limiting them. This is also the reason I chose unity, because it is the easiest and most open engine for mod support.

    While I want the game to be multiplayer, I will consider a 3-4 coop at most. It will be impossible to create a immersive story in a server based game. Also adding multiplayer on a large scale will add immense work which will probably cause my game to fail.

    That said, I need some help on where to start. My first guess would be to get a editor up and running, that lets me effectively create a cube based landscape. But what then.

    If someone can point me in the direction, where I can effectively start as one person(I will try and recruit people in my city, once I have something to show)

    Q: Is my plan to go into Early acces?
    A: Yes, but not with the goal of selling something unfinished. Rather I want to have the story, mechanics, fighting and so on, finished. But I need the community in order to fix bugs and glitches, there is no way around that in a large open world game.

    Q: Do you actually have any idea what you are doing
    A:Yes I do, in terms of coding but not in planning or designing, that's why I am here asking :D

    Q:Why cubes?
    A: Because this is the best method of creating something beautiful, while not having to invest 3 or 4 years in creating assets that in the end have bad animations glitches that I am unable to fix and so on.

    Q:How much time do you plan to invest in creating this game?
    A:I hope I can get the skeleton of the game running in 3 years and after that I want to start recruiting people. Another 2 years before I get early acces and another year in order to reach the 1.0 goal. This is of course just a estimation. But 6 years should be a good timeline.

    Thanks for reading, every single tip I appreciate, from veterans or just from people who love gaming. Everything is welcomed.

    Also before I forget, I want to build this game so that adding new content is possible without any issues even late in development. So a very modular and open system
     
    Last edited: Jul 17, 2018
  2. JoeStrout

    JoeStrout

    Joined:
    Jan 14, 2011
    Posts:
    9,859
    This is mostly not a game design question. At your stage, you need to seriously level up your Unity skills. I would recommend subscribing to (and using) the Getting Started forum, where you will both learn from other newbies and have a good place to ask your own questions.

    A voxel world (which is the proper term for what you're proposing) is not trivial to implement. I've done it a couple of times, and can offer some advice when you get to that point. (Throwing a few thousand cubes into a scene is not a viable way to do it.)

    But don't worry about that yet; put your dream game on the back burner and build up those skills by starting with some trivial games. Clone Doodle Jump, Flappy Bird, Space Invaders. Work your way through the tutorials, actually doing them on your computer (not just watching/reading them, which is a waste of time).

    And have fun on the journey! Programming is one of the most satisfying and rewarding skills you could possibly choose. You're young and you're off to a great start, so enjoy!
     
    astracat111, Gigiwoo and angrypenguin like this.
  3. Deadly_fallout

    Deadly_fallout

    Joined:
    Jul 17, 2018
    Posts:
    7
    Hello!

    Thank you for your replie!

    I might not be as new as you think I am :p I have 2 years of experience, constantly developing stuff in Unity for my personal use. I created a lot of small "games", to learn Vfx, lods and so on. I can create something similar to flappy bird or space invaders in 30 mins. Infact I already have some code written for something like that, I just need graphics. I already have a renderer in mind that should give me atleast in theory, unlimited workspace without getting a performance issue. I made a chunk renderer for a procedural voxel map I tested out a while back. This is pretty much a very simple system but I can build upon that I suppose.

    It is a game design question on the fundamental level, since I never tried creating something professional. The advice im seeking is what is the most important part to focus on at the start. With what should one begin. Character design, getting scripts ready, getting and editor ready to simplify stuff?

    I know that design is a difficult term for this, but it is. I don't know how to design a game, I can get it to work on a technical level but then getting something that feels alive and immersive is a different thing. And I don't think beginner tutorials can really help me on that so it is a trial and error thing I guess.

    I know it is called a voxel based game, but I don't like to use this term very much, since everyone associates Minecraft clones with it. Which it isn't on a technical level at all.

    Thank you :)
     
    astracat111 likes this.
  4. digiross

    digiross

    Joined:
    Jun 29, 2012
    Posts:
    323
    Forget anything fancy, if your serious then create the most basic minimum viable product.. Basically get the functionality you want and the game playable and any assets, characters, quests, sound, you name it can come later. So get a basic world, basic movement, etc and make it playable. Go!
     
    astracat111 and JoeStrout like this.
  5. Joe-Censored

    Joe-Censored

    Joined:
    Mar 26, 2013
    Posts:
    11,847
    I like your concept for the game, but I have a feeling you don't fully appreciate the scope of the project even though you say it will take years. The game you describe at the scale I expect you want would take a moderately sized team of experienced developers several years to get a minimally viable game in a state where it could be sold, even without multiplayer.

    You also should never start learning game development with a large project. You should start with something very small that you can finish alone in under 6 months. This is so you can learn how to develop games, how to do so with the engine, and how the different phases of game development work, in a short enough time frame that you can actually finish. And when I say finish, I mean actually publish it on some storefront, because if that is not your goal it is far too easy to call your game finished but when someone plays it you keep telling them what not to do because this or that is broken, or you didn't expect them to do whatever in that way, but when your game is actually finished and published you need to have all those details anticipated and handled.

    You mentioned you can create a flappy birds in 30 minutes, well yeah getting a basic flappy birds clone functioning is actually really easy. Have you every polished one of these games to the point it is in a state that can be delivered to customers though? That is actually the part I would really recommend practicing, because I'd expect it will add an extra month to the development of that 30 minute game. Scale that up to a game that can take years to get running, and you may be looking at a decade or more of polish before it is really ready to be taken seriously.

    Also, you aren't going to be able to count on the community to find glitches for you. For a game this size you're going to need internal QA of some kind to test it. When you release in early access, understand that is your official release of the game. Your game will build its reputation around the state it was in during the beginning months of early access. If you then work on it another 2 years before taking it out of early access, no one new cares, it won't get any release press, it won't get anyone new talking about your new game release because it isn't a new release. It fundamentally at that point is a game that released 2 years ago that just got its latest patch, so gets as much notice as any other 2 year old game that receives an update.

    Lastly, people who would buy a game in early access aren't doing so to become unpaid QA. For the most part they will not report any issues, and even if they did they aren't trained QA engineers so won't know how to write a clear and reproducible bug report. Generally they ignore problems and assume since they hit them you must know about them. If you don't fix them they blame you for being a bad developer, or complain publicly about how bad your game is, while still not making any attempt to contact you directly to report the issue. My day job is software QA and even I don't file bug reports for early access games I play.
     
    JoeStrout likes this.
  6. BIGTIMEMASTER

    BIGTIMEMASTER

    Joined:
    Jun 1, 2017
    Posts:
    5,181
    If you have to ask, "where do I begin?", you aren't ready yet!

    Save your magnum opus for that time when you can think of any basic game and build a prototype of it in a few days. Save it for when you've made enough indie projects that you have a very good idea about what the common issues you will face throughout the entire production are, and how to solve them. Save it for when you know that you know how to design all the systems, refine them, and can deliver it with the utmost confidence.

    By all means, jump into the fire and challenge yourself as you have been, but if your first question starting a big project is, "where do I start?" you need to start many much smaller projects, and finish them.
     
    Joe-Censored likes this.
  7. hippocoder

    hippocoder

    Digital Ape

    Joined:
    Apr 11, 2010
    Posts:
    29,723
    He is ready. They all are when you link the Learn Section. Did someone link it? :D
     
    Kiwasi and Gigiwoo like this.
  8. Gigiwoo

    Gigiwoo

    Joined:
    Mar 16, 2011
    Posts:
    2,981
    angrypenguin likes this.
  9. Kiwasi

    Kiwasi

    Joined:
    Dec 5, 2013
    Posts:
    16,860
    Typically its best to start by building a prototype of the most risky piece of your game. That could be the most technically difficult. Or it could mean getting the core loop set up. Or it could mean trying out some unique mechanics. Go through your list of features and figure out which one is the most likely to give you trouble, and start there.

    The intent of starting with the riskiest piece it allowing your game to fail early. If your core mechanic isn't fun, or your core technology isn't feasible, you want to know about it as early as possible. That way you can pull out before you have sunk resources into the game.
     
  10. astracat111

    astracat111

    Joined:
    Sep 21, 2016
    Posts:
    725
    This is coming from someone that's been working ft for 2 years on a turn based rpg....If there are ANY premade resources for voxel games out there, USE THEM. Don't do it from scratchy, PLEASE don't do it from scratch if you don't need to. You need to buy that IK maker or whatever it's called and learn that or something. There are voxel demos out there pre-made I think that you can use.

    Also it's called a 'voxel' game:

    https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/voxel-master-56233
    https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/modeling/voxel-forge-20619
    http://picavoxel.com/

    Just a quick search.