A Game in the Making: The Power of Friendship Log #1
Starting Development on an Indie Game Project
Hello peeps, I'm Kelseu! This is my first written post here on Glitches, so it's a little nerve-wracking but I've got a bunch of people over here looking at this before publishing, so I'll manage. I've started this post to talk about something that doodledrop and I started working on. It's a game! Well, not yet, but it will be.
For a long time now, doodle and I have been coming up with concepts for games and have made countless design documents for them. If you're not familiar with the term design document, it's a document that outlines everything in a game, kinda like a blueprint. A design doc sets the scope, defines a general direction that the game would go in, and keeps all the developers on the same page. With every new document we made, we would commit a month at a time and never start actually creating anything for the game (only just talking about it) which kind of left us stuck for a while. Late last year, we decided to fully commit to one of our ideas, "The Power of Friendship". We are still working on the title, but for now, this is what we will be calling it until we get a little bit further in development.
As the name suggests, The Power of Friendship aims to be a cooperative experience where you work together as a team. The first pitch of our game is:
"As professional dungeon delvers, you and your ragtag group of friends form a party to go adventuring in dungeons with the hopes of raking in some serious cash. Dungeon dive, collect objects, kill monsters, and complete quests to develop your party into one of the best while earning money to customize your guild hall, deck out your character, or buy weapons and items to help you succeed!"
This will be the first game we've ever made together and we'll be learning a lot along the way.
Kelseu
On an individual level, I am super excited to work on a 3D game project! As a third-year Game Design student, I have worked on a completed game through my program (9 Catastrophes, if you're interested). It is a 2D zombie apocalypse platformer where you play as a cat, and I personally did all of the character work for this project (including animations and such). However, I have yet to make a 3D game which is where my true skills lie. I will be responsible for the characters, their clothes, accessories, and weapons. doodledrop and I will be sharing the art processes and modeling of the environment. (We will be posting about these more in future logs!) The main struggle for me will be trying to model with the game perspective in mind. The camera perspective of our game is going to be third person from a pretty far distance, so trying to keep that in mind will be difficult for me.
doodledrop
I have a ton of unfinished game projects and prototypes for games, so I'm trying to get into a flow that will motivate me to finish this particular project. While this might be my first game, I have several years of experience with coding, 3D modeling, and Unity stuff. That said, I don't have much experience doing anything with multiplayer games. I still have to learn a lot before I can actually finish this project. I think I'll be able to get through it without too much trouble. I've noticed that I always complete projects when they are a collab effort, so I'm confident that trend will continue with this project I'm working on with Kelseu!
If you have any feedback or thoughts on our project, feel free to talk about it below. Either way, this game will be an informative but also fun process for both of us. I hope you continue to follow our development on The Power of Friendship!