/// So, i just watch how people develop games and im quite trilled with the process, so i decided to embark on an adventure, wich involves me developing 12 games in 12 months, from doodling to complete publishing through steam or any other form of realese,anyway as part of this challenge i realize that the only way that i can be accountable for, its through the forum or some sort of diary or binnacle, to make the challenge more appealing to me,since i get bored extremely fast, and if for some reason anyone from the forum wants to do this embodiment of crazzines , then this is your place, share away your psychotic experiences about game development or any form of new years resolution, since my its to learn game development and applied it right away to keep the neurons flowing.
I already have some ideas of what to do and how to do it, so im cheating a little bit, the start line its today and the finish line will be the end of 2017.
****(sorry for my grammar, english its not my native language)****
What game engine are you going to use? Now, advice from a hobby game dev: Whatever you have planned, double the time and effort you expect to put into it and you will get about a quarter of the real time and effort you will actually have to put into the project. Basically what i am trying to say is: If you are new to this, think small if you want to finish anything. An endless runner, Doodle jump clone, flappy bird clone, stuff like that are easily achievable for someone, that is new to the world of game design. At the moment you start to think about Skyrim, Dark Souls, Call Of Duty, DotA, League - you are never ever ever going to create this. Ever. Are you a team of 200 people? No? Then you will never going to create things like that. So again, what engine do you use? Color me intrigued :)
I will use UE4, since it's the most easy for me, I already try a lot of other engines(unity,cryengine, frostbite etc), and yes, the games will be simple, since I already have the cold truth and experience about developing complicated games, the cool thing about UE4 it's that, as long you have some sort of programming logic, you can develop games without Codding, with the help of blueprints and also I will take advantage of the paper 2d features.
I expected something like "game maker" with drag and drop "programing", but since you already know what you are doing with it... I am staying away from 3D like the plague...
Smart boy/girl... 2D is really the way to go IMHO :)
Simple Plataformer Game - just 1 character - scenarios:just 1 sprite per scenario with collisions built-in - challenge or enemy: traps and enviroment traps. - simple levels with all the fancy filters off - health bar - no scoring system - menu system -level system - animations or flipbooks with no more than 3 sprites. - Maybe transitions per level.... maybe, and i guess lightining, only if is not to complicated for me. - no particles -no materiales instances or any other form of materials. -controls: walk/run,jump,attack and charge attack.
that will be fun to see. Should make a new thread for each game, just like an over view would be cool of the game and how hard you thought it was to make maybe tips on what your learned if you are feeling nice :)
doesn't have to be an in depth thing, but you could do that and link back to your OP here
Can't wait to see how it goes, I want to do something like this this year as well, just got to find the time
Live stream your development sessions. It doesn't matter if nobody watches. It will keep you moving, thinking clearly, and help you avoid distractions.
Use OBS and stream to youtube. It takes 3 minutes to setup.
Just FYI, It's a tactic Notch used when he coded minecraft. I remember watching the streams.
Watching notch coding its like feynman explaning quantum mechanics, you get some of what they are explaining or doing, but at the same time, you acknowledge the level of expertise that carry their words, its so impressive.
I have a very similar issue when it comes to sticking with a project. I often get bored and lose motivation. An interesting solution I've found for my latest project is to just work on something different whenever I feel motivation slipping.
I kinda hop around development like a madman but so far it's working. I've made more progress on this project than any other project before. Writing the physics controller for the hovercraft was a nightmare though. Lots of complex functions and trial and error when it came to the physics engine. Just an example of the mess that's still on the optimization table.
This is an interesting idea though. I'll maybe join in or do something similar. Maybe in Unreal since I've really wanted to learn it but keep falling back to Unity haha.
nice way of coping with boreness, i actually use the forum as my coping mechanism, since it helps me to stay focus by making frequent updates about my projects.
Yeah I've been posting updates to my project on here as well. Getting feedback is a major source of motivation, even if its just a few posts.
Also I see you're using Blueprint quite heavily. Is there a tutorial series or article of some kind that you would recommend for someone wanting to pick it up? Every time I've tried Unreal I always seem to fall back to C++ since I'm so used to programming with it and similar languages. Just doesn't seem appealing to me despite hearing it's quite powerful.
Actually, there's a couple of videos call: "creating a 2d side scroller" from UE4 YouTube channel and also Zak perish blueprints videos, and that's it.
C++ it's powerfully, but you can also achieve the same results with blueprints.
I think that the only case that I will ever gonna use C++, it's when I'm presented with a problem that has too much redundancy using BP's.
I don't know anything about this but I think it's a good idea to crank out 12 quickie games. It's kind of like when I'm doing a Graphic Design project. Crank out as much as can, as fast as you can. The games probably won't be great, but you will learn a lot.
Then pick the best one and work on that ONE game for a year making it really good. I recently bought an indie game (Retro City Rampage DX) because the game was pretty good, but just OK. When I heard that 1 guy worked for 5 years to make it, I felt he deserved a few bucks for all the effort.
I am more of an idea person and I know nothing about, nor do I have an interest in game development. I have two game ideas that I tried and failed to learn UE4 on. Soo I did what I am good at, sketching out the idea. In order to record my ideas, and to maybe sell the concept, is create storyboards using PowerPoint.
First I wrote a description of the game and script outline of the game in Word. Opening cinematic, start point of game, objectives, core game, side missions, end game, final cinematic, etc and I left plenty of blank space to flesh out each idea more as development progresses. Then I made slide shows creating art in Photoshop to illustrate the basic story concept of the game and how the game play works. It was more so I would not forget all the thought I put into it. I wrote to a few companies but they didn't even bother sending me a rejection letter.
That's Incredible, I actually love to write, my process it's almost the same, but since I can't draw, I write everything about a game,then I take a good look at it, after that I reduce the idea to a simple game and at last I create a character from the simple idea.