OL RIGHT ! Rubber meets the tarmac.
Since the last post, I realized that it was no walk in the park as I sat down and disected the parts that would make up a 2D RPG.
And the revelation was staggering. I needed :
- A Plan to define the tasks in the dev journey.
- A fictional narrative to engage the player.
- A 2D Game Engine and toolset to build the damn thing.
- Tons of artworks
- A gameplay logic to bind it all.
Plan:
I began putting all the tasks in a old excel sheet. There are no timelines defined for now as it felt like I was on a raft in the middle of sea. Ahem !
Fiction:
I decided that the player can be a apprentice mage who goes out on a mission to hell and back retrieve some weapons to help defend his hometown and would gradually evolve to be a grand wizard or something.
Ah, sounds like a thrilling novel already !
I feel the demo should have atleast 10-15 levels to get the point across. There! a decision made.
2D Engine:
Now, this was a scary and daunting search thing that kept me up last night. I dont have a studio set up but an entry level Dell G3 gaming laptop. I downloaded Unity and began running one of the demos...and...the cooling fans began hissing louder than rattler. It also meant that something like Unreal was a no no.
Then, I found something called Godot I played with it for an hour and it clicked. The leraning curve seemed relatively flat and it seemed it had a very component oriented quick creation process.
There was a debugger and IDE to code within using GDScript unless you are using C#. There was a animation system, a particle system, a map system, camera, collisions, physics, desktop and mobile porting, parallax layers, 2D lighting, postprocessing.....and the complate package is FREE and OPEN-SOURCE
And thus another decision made.
Artworks:
This is something I am still looking out for. I am no artist and no animator. So I dablle sometimes with Blender and GIMP. However, I might have to check on the asset marketplaces like GameDevMarket or get someone on Fiverr.
I am inclined towards an isometric view with tons of effects.
Keeping this option open now as to how to source the artworks.
Gameplay:
This is the heart of the game mechanics. The rewards (coins, powerups, ranks) and penalties (deaths and injuries) will need be tight to deliver a satisfactory and plausible experience. I have been working out some numbers as below.
Most of it will likely change over time with tuning but I guess this is a good start point.
And there, hands in the dirt ! Till next time.
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