Summer Project
polycounter lvl 8
Alright, me and a few programmer buddies of mine want to make a small game over the summer. Nothing is planned out as of yet and this is not some "oh yea, were going to make the best game and get rich" sort of thing were just doing it for the hell of it. What Im asking here is, how should we approach this? We will be using unity. Were getting together next week to brainstorm and such but what logical steps should we be taking? What i was thinking is brainstorm, get a design document together, rough and not very pretty but playable prototype, and then flush things out make it pretty and work out kinks, is this the right way to approach this and am i missing anything? If it helps when we talked before we did decide to go for either a 3d side-scroller (kirby and the crystal shards for N64 sorta 3d) or a small rts game.
Replies
You have the right idea about process - definitely don't try to think of anything super-complicated or large, stick with stuff that you all know how to do already, pick a few simple gameplay mechanics and get them in FAST so you can test the game itself. Use blockout / placeholder / programmer art for everything initially, since unless you guys are all super good game designers, chances are you will be changing the game mechanics a fair bit until it's fun.
Probably while the programmers are doing that you can work on concepts and initial models for assets you are fairly sure aren't going to change, and generally plan out the style and art direction.
Just don't get too far into detailing/fleshing out the world too early, or it's likely you'll run out of steam before finishing.
Then again, I don't have much experience in this field, that's just what I'd do. There are probably other people around here who have much more solid ideas and workflows for a small fun project like this.
Thinking of an idea or a concept first hand before first meeting would be a good idea because than you will have half of your concept work done. The rest of the half maybe modified by your partners after discussions. (since you are working in a group and will put a brainstorm on paper with them I assume)
A rough sketch of initial characters and a scene would also do you a good deed to help understand what you exactly want to do. So practically a game storyline and initial characters(either roughly defined in points, or roughly sketched) and rough game storyline. (It is what I did and I know exactly what I wanted to do after that, yet I still modify the storyline every now and than).
This is just a thought. I wouldnt walk in to the game dev group without any idea what I wish to propose or what I want to do there.
So I'd say go for a simple idea, and evolve it should you wish once you've actually gotten anywhere. It's quite normal I think that people who brainstorm about a game usually comes up with hundreds of abilities and features storylines and stuff that leads ultimately nowhere, but really, just keep it simple
So if you want to do a sidescroller. Get like 2-3 simple enemies behaving in a certain way, make your guy run along and go shoot em. Then move on to the features and abilities. And the storyline, that's just some crap you could make up at the end, unless it's gonna be a sort of rpg thing
just my 2 cents