Welcome to the beginning of my most ambitious project to date. In this episode I lay the foundations for my game that will hopefully turn out as good as it is in my head. #DreamGame #Devlog #Unity
I just hope you've made a good amount of documentation beforehand, things can easily spiral out of control without it. One of the most common things what happens to solo devs is that new features get added on the fly. Although this is not a huge deal at the start since no plan is set in stone, it can lead to you never completing your game and overcomplicated mechanics. I'd recommend making at least a Game Design Document, something you can refer to in case you don't know what to make next or to keep you on the right path. If you're feeling like it you can also use Trello to keep track of your tasks.
For a solo indy dev (yes, all of them), no one should be talking bad about using assets. Triple-A studios use them, and they have teams of hundreds of developers. The biggest thing that holds back indy devs is time. If assets from the asset store or elsewhere save you time, then that's more time you have to spend on your game. It increases the likelihood that you'll actually finish. Assets are a good thing!
Yeah.. The problem, however, is the vast number of "devs", who think it's acceptable to just slam a bunch of different assets together (without doing any custom work with them), call it a day, and then sell the game for 20$.. Thats where the "using assets is bad" vibe comes from..
I agree, for 90% of stuff is better not to reinvent the wheel, grass, wood, generic furniture those are more than fine to use, but level design and the design of main characters should be original, would be interesting if every game has the same looking guy as protagonist os main villain. Sometimes, if your game has a very defined style, you have to use custom made assets for most stuff (think something like hello neighbor, i know bad game in general but, very stylized game where premade props wouldn't be as fitting for the cartoony and jagged style)
Mate, don't stress about using assets. I think for your first game as a single dev it's actually the right thing to do. We've all seen devs starting with making their own engine, getting nowhere. Done is better than perfect, keep on trucking.
I am about to publish my 8th game on apple store and %90 of my games developed with assets :D. I dont know what i would do without mighty, creative and smart artists and developers.
@@skillfirstgames2926 There are unfortunately. It's mostly because some people flooded the Steam market with games that used completely paid assets, 1 small map (sometimes the demo map in an asset pack) and then some small code to get some very basic combat and then call it a day. Assets are maid so that people can use them while putting genuine effort into a project but their reputation got ruined because of very low effort projects.
Liking the fact that you are just ploughing on in and then will solve the 'art' side later. It's quite refreshing as a devlog. I've seen lots of developers recently saying "Don't waste time building from scratch" and someone used the analogy that you don't have the 'birth' Robert DeNiro for your film, you want to 'hire' him to be in your film, and we should think of assets and code in the same way. What do you think?
Yeah I agree. When starting a game the mechanics should be the first thing you want to get polished. No point spending tons of time on art when the game isn't going to be fun.
Think about the assets that are central to the gameplay. The rest is just fluff, no matter how important it is to the final product. For example, you can make your Harvest Moon game with zero interesting assets, while you figure out how to make it fun. But when working on, say, combat Kenshi - you already need assets that are fit for that; it affects the way the combat works, it's not just glitter. That said, it can be a nice downtime from all the coding and complexities of that. That's also fine :P But even that is still simpler to do in a 2D game. 3D games are still annoyingly hard to make, and most of the tools still focus on achieving more, rather than achieving with less :D
I'm hoping to be creating some kind of game through this summer before I go to college, and just the little things you showed are already a big help, and I've got so many ideas flowing with what I could do. Can't wait to see the progress you make on this game, and see how much your idea changes as you move through this project.
Looks promising. Great video, I recently decided to start a devlog as well and now have a whole another level of appreciation for the people that put in the work to make a video log of the journey they have to go through when creating their game, since anyone that has tried knows it slows down the game developing process a ton and every time you think about how much faster you could do something if you didn't have to explain yourself in a video :D. Worth it in the end tho.
Awesome video! I think you know that the best thing to do is have the prototype as soon as possible so you can start polishing the gameplay. Using already made assets is perfect for that. Subscribed :)
Awesome devlog! Love the general game loop idea, mixing up the peacefulness of farming with the defence and survival stuff sounds super fun. And on the assets, its weird that people see the use of assets as a bad thing. Speeding up the amount of time it takes to kickstart a game is especially good for actually getting an idea off the ground.
Hey there! Game Design Grad here! Highly recommend getting some GDD's (Game Design Documents) drafted up listing out all potential mechanics, interactions, setups and more. We use something called a GRATIS (Goals, Rules, Actions, Transitions, Items, and Setup) as a basic document so that we can lay out all of our ideas firsthand in order to better set yourself up for success! In a similar document you should list out three pillars of your design. What are the three main pillars of design for the game? For example, Cory Balrog from "God of War" (2018) had his three pillars on display in their office so the team could refer back to them whenever they felt lost or unsure of a design decision. I believe his were "Combat, Father/son relationship, and Exploration." Under each pillar they listed some key aspects to those design keywords that helped illustrate the most important focuses. It was very useful, helping them retain a cohesive progression as they marched towards their final product. If you need any help or have questions surrounding game design I do freelance consulting and planning for games! Cheers friend and good luck!
Wow Altyrn, that's very insightful! Thanks so much for leaving this comment! I am just starting out working on my dream game too and this is definitely useful as a guide. Definitely going to try implementing them in my work going forward!
Not when you have a whole team to relay design choices with. For solo dev's and the like it can be helpful for retaining scope and focus. Would hardly call it a waste of time.
I LOVE THE STYLE OF THE CONTENT! AND I REALLY ENCOURAGE YOU TO GO ON WITH YOUR DREAM GAME! best of luck man! Ill be watching your devlogs from now on so do not let us down, go all the way! Dont let us down!
There's no problem in using external assets, as other comments have said; it saves a big amount of time for indie developers. I personally use them a fair amount of time when i'm doing the prototyping (as i can observe you are doing as well) and it actually helps a lot. There are even assets that end up staying and that 's okay as well, they wouldn't be in the asset store if they weren't for you to use. I think what most people could possibly complain about is probably "originality" (or however you spell that) which gives your game that unique and individual touch that identifies your style, but it all depends on what works for you. It's your game, but not only that; it's your Dream Game so do as you like! Great video by the way, hope to see more videos about your progress!
Indie Dev here! Love the concept, reminds me of Boom Beach (a game I was addicted to for a couple years) best of luck! Can't wait to see where this goes
This is super inspiring, first of all I love this idea for a game. I've never been interested in survival games because of the traveling. The idea of having one base that you build up sounds so fun. Secondly this gives me so much hope. I'm a game dev student with a full time job. I've always worried that when I'm done with school I'll have to quit my job if I want to follow my dreams (I'm not financially stable enough for that lmao) seeing that you have made this much progress just working after work is amazing. I already subscribed because I can't wait to see what you are able to come up with!
Yeah im also not finacialy stable enough to quit my job so finding the balance between work and game dev is a must. It is a little tricky but I really wish I had started earlier. Good luck with school and following your passion!
There's a game similar to this on steam called Atomic crops, though it is 2D pixel art. Awesome game! However, gripes with it were that it was not multiplayer. A 3D game where you can build and construct your base sounds far more fun, having farming and round based defense seems fun. The atomic crops games uses a day and night thing like you described, gathering resources and farming during the day and fighting and defending your farm at night. Muck also does a day gather night fight type of thing. I really hope you stick to this and get it on steam, sounds like a game that's right up my alley!!
This is awesome, I'm hoping to do the same thing and I can't wait to see what you do! Good luck! Keep it up! I'm rooting for you and so excited to see where you go
Cool Idea! Sounds very similar to 7 days to die, a game where you explore and gather rescourses during daytime, and stay in your base during night time. You also need to build a good base because every 7 days a horde tries to kill you. Looking forward to this!
As a beginner Godot game dev this is so relatable in terms of trying to save time where you can by working smarter and not harder. You will reach great heights especially since you are good with Blender. I'm waiting for part 2! Good luck
I bet a lot of programmers know the feeling, you have a full time job, you're coming home sick and tired of all the bullshit you gotta deal with at work and you just wanna relax, open RU-vid, play videogames, maybe watch a TV show. But instead you push through, open Unity and start writing code. And honestly, in this circumstances, I would use every asset, addon, copy-paste every stackoverflow snippet, whatever it takes, to make a prototype and deliver MVP eventually. I see absolutely no problem with that approach. It is not low effort, nor it is bad in any way - it is just a smart development workflow. And by the way - great delivery in the video, I know for a fact in took some effort to write the script with funny jokes. Also masking what is essentially a promotional material as a devlog is kinda genious. Good job all around.
Awesome video! And a couple suggestions: 1. Maybe have it be so you can have multiple base's, but every now and again there'll be a catastrophe/dragon that attacks, a base, when that happens your civilians could retreat to the other base until you handle the problem. Or you could have one base, and since there are more resources you can defeat the catastrophe quickly and nobody has to leave, risk/reward. 2. Since the game revolves around a little boy in a mech it'd be really cool if you could do certain things in the mech suit and other things as the player. I see an interaction where you have to leave your mech to get some berries, but when you come back your surrounded by monsters, so you have to sneak to your mech so you can fight/escape from them. 3. Your Blender rig has way to many polygons, rather than extruding over and over again, use the "smooth" setting and it should have the same effect. (I extruded a lot when I started aswell) 4. Back up a little bit from your mic, and in post raise the volume some. Record in a closet with lots of clothes if you're not already, if you have $70-$100 to spare I'd suggest making a makeshift recording booth, it works like a charm: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-dTzMjqdXD-4.html 5. Please please please please scope your game, that's all I'll say. It's so easy to start a project and work on it for 6 months then wanna give up, but then the sunken cost fallacy sets in and you spend 2 more years on it until the realization sets in that you'll never finish it... or that's what I hear anyways. Awesome video, I'm really looking forward to the next one!
It's nice to see someone be so transparent about using assets. Building everything from scratch takes ages, and when it's not the only thing you have going on in your life, game development is very slow. Best of luck.
this sounds like a really interesting gameplay loop, and I really love the characters and reasoning behind why the robot is trying so hard to protect the base, and why the boy can't leave for fear of monsters. you've got ludonarrative harmony baked in right from the start! :) I've been brainstorming a game idea with some some similarities around base building/exploration and gathering, only mine is more focused on decoration rather than defense. I've been tossing around ideas for how to keep the exploration/gathering portion interesting though, which I imagine you'll run into in a while. Right now I think that exploring the same map for slowly regenerating resources can get really repetitive and boring, so I'm considering generating new islands/dimensions/what-have-you every time a player wants to go explore, but in such a way that the player can recognize where to go to find the resources they're looking for (eg. looking for some very visible terrain landmarks to find certain plants or metals). I hope that helps. I'm not usually into base defense as a genre, but you've piqued my interest and I'm curious to see where you'll go with this! :)
That's a nice idea Bo! I'm thinking of making a monster taming game like Pokemon and the repetitive portion of discovering monsters do sounds like a problem
Your game idea kinda reminds me of Scrap Mechanic Survival mode, where you have to protect your farm from robots that spawn in waves at night Looking forward to see the development of this!
I've been wanting a game with this type of concept for so damn long. Never found anything that really suited me, so I'm really excited to see this for when it comes out!
Hey man, I'm a new indie game developer. and I'm 1 month in with my game development. I've been inspired by your dev logs and decided to create one myself. Finally I was able to publish my first ever game Dev Log for my 1st indie game like Dark Souls but you play as the Monster. Thanks for the inspiration man... 🤟
If you have problems with modelling in blender, you can try modelling a low poly based character, because it can result really well and in my opinion it's really simple to learn
@@overphildev Blender Guru has a bunch of good videos on modeling, one that will surely help with game assets is the anvil tutorial. Its long and well explained and you will learn some important concepts like edge flow, subdividing and beveling properly, and most importantly, baking normal maps from sculpted high poly mesh to your starting low poly mesh for free detail. It's incredible how much is packed in one tutorial (it took me about 8 hours to go through it)
huge subscribe, very excited to see where this is going! as an aspiring game dev, these sorts of videos help motivate me a lot to actually just get started finally, thank you :)
I think this game would be more fun if you'd make the map pre-built instead of randomly generated, because learning the map and locations in a game is a lot of fun. Also this can lead to more creativity with areas and can make it so there's a clearer progression in the game, like for example having level-locked areas.
Woow after the video was over i realized u completly had my attention and I stopt thinking about all my life problems for 5 min tha k u very much i instantly subcribed!!!
if you don't want weird squish squashing on your character when your robot walks around for example, you can assign bones to specific vertex groups on your mesh, so when the bone moves only the assign group to that bone will move, and your robobutt wont be all stretchy
"Including one completely made out of cubes because i thought it would be the easiest" Oh no i felt that haha kinda wish you showed the result cause now i just have to imagine how badly the model warped
This is the first time I've seen you but you made me laugh to death, no offense but I didn't expect the video to be good at first and you proved me wrong. You just earned a new subscriber
Loving the concept, it kind of reminded me of Atomicrops in a way so I’d say if you haven’t played that yet it might be a good idea to do so and maybe get some inspiration from it?
When you were talking about the different games and your "vision" of your dream game, it sounded so much like Atomicrops to me. That game is cute, though it's much more time-based/speed oriented-ish and less casual than you might be going for?
2:47 Hey hey hey, there's nothing wrong with using assets that you've bought for your game, not everyone has time to be create EVERY single asset from scratch; if it helps with the progress of your game, you should go ahead and utilize them.
Ah- great idea! I've had similar thoughts of games that are a bunch of other games/genres together and similar ones to what you're doing. Glad there are people who can make these games a reality.
Hello, amazing content! I'm making procedural worldmyself too and if you want to want to place objects like trees, bushes etc i recommend poisson disc sampling. Sebastian has a video on this topic as well :)
Yup, nothing wrong with using assets, AAA games have millions of dollars to to pay people to sit around modelling unique barrels all day. Exciting to see you getting started, but be wary of scope creep! Sounds like a Tremendous project with tons of room for burnout and overwhelm. Good luck, subbed :D
You might run into a contradiction that might be opportunities : - Procedurally generated world but you want to have just one main base : if you spend some parts of your days tending to the farm/base, and the night defending the base, there won't be much exploring Some ways you could try to deal with that : - Make exploring easier with a system of portals/teleport locations to swap back to the last place you were exploring - Make your character gradually stronger over nights of fighting, but also for exploring : movement speed, jumping heights... This way you can go farther every time. To fit with this, you would have to make the base/farm expandable at a similar scale to not have your character zoom around a tiny place : planting speeds, farming areas, building sizes... That path could nearly take you towards the path of a Satisfactory/Factorio type game for the base side of things. Could tie that in with the 'robot' idea : beep boop i am robot i swap my arm for a massive rake boop beep i now farm faster - Make that only your base (and other designated areas?) are safe from the procedural generation, but the land around you re-generate every night (oOOOOoo the night monsters are corrupted demons from another dimension oOOoOOOo the death of their final boss causes some kind of spooky dimensional lore excuse). Could link parameters of the next generation to the performance of the previous map (higher perf = more challenging terrains, and more late game objects found in it)? - Night monsters are weaker to specific things, that are found (and/or need to be replenished?) in specific areas of the world around the base, incentivizing going towards specific directions/areas at different days - Make your base travel across the land. Maybe not physically like flying, but a piece of the land you are in, like a small island, traveling through the ocean, making every other island/landmass you get close to new. With the setting you have, any landmass that takes more than a few minutes to get across will functionally seem like a potentially massive continent, as the player has to go back to defend their base That's a few thoughts I have, feel free to do anything or nothing with them, and good luck developing, don't forget to have fun :3
I think that everyone that criticise using assets from asset store has never tried doing an game as solo dev. I mean using asset store may be the difference from launching the game or just giving up in the project. I'm supporting your game good luck man!
First of all, the ideas you have as a foundation for your game sound amazing. Second of all, I am so fucking happy Sebastian is getting recognition. Thirdly, I may not be a firefighter, but I know when something is on fire. In the game dev world, developers sometimes try too hard to make a game, to the detriment of the game they are making. Here's what I mean. Ubisoft makes games. From Software makes player experiences. See what I mean? So, my one and only piece of advice, is, think from the perspective of the player. It has to really be fun, and not just because those features put together are supposed to create fun, somehow. At that point you're making a game, not a player experience. I'm using the term 'game' as a bad thing, because it's become a commercialized monster of a thing, games are not player experiences anymore.
The idea sounds great! However, I would caution against bloating the scope of your game. Putting all of these great ideas into one game is gonna require a ridiculous amount of work. Just importing a 3D character and drawing some shapes is nothing compared to designing an actual game and putting in audio/story/structure/AI/ect. I hope this works out though, sounds like a cool idea
this was super fun to watch! and as someone who just recently learned unity for a class and came from blender, it was cool seeing someone start their dream project and learn! im def gonna hit sub cause i want to see this through to the end!
