Yes, hello!
So, we’ve been working on a prototype game for a few months now and after reading the development breakdown of the lovely Tom Francis‘ game, Gunpoint, I thought maybe it’d be worth posting some stuff here, on this website I set up ages ago and then left…
First thing’s first…
I suppose I should clarify who ‘we’ is, shouldn’t I? Well, I’m Ash (Hello!), and the other two team members are Miles and Dan. Since we all have full-time, paying jobs that aren’t making games and we’re new to this game development business, we don’t really have concrete roles, but Miles and I have been doing the coding while Dan does the vast majority of the artwork. We’ve all had a hand in the design of the prototype because, despite many, many years of playing games, we’ve never actually designed one before.
The plan
So, after a few months of Miles and I learning Objective-C (for no particular reason), we made the jump to Unity and asked Dan to join us. We poked and prodded at it for a while and made some good progress learning the ropes, before running out of steam a little when things started getting complicated. Then I suggested we make a plan to help focus us on the daunting prospect of making an actual game (prototype) and that’s what we’ve been doing for the last few months: we’ve created about 247,936 documents and spreadsheets on Google Drive (roughly), set ourselves tasks, and met up once a week (most of the time) to chat and see how things are going, and it seems to be working. It’s starting to actually look like a game.
Where we are now
Right now – as of yesterday, in fact – we’re in very early alpha (that’s what we’re calling it anyway) – the game has lots of unfinished stuff and most of the models are untextured, etc., but it has objectives and it’s technically possibly to complete it from start to finish. I was quite excited about this, to be honest.
So that’s a very brief update of the last few months. With any luck I’ll remember to post here every now and then about what’s happened, maybe even include some screenshots and/or videos of where things are and how it’s starting to take shape. And on that note…
Look at it!
Here are a couple of screenshots from a few weeks ago: