WHERE TO GET STARTED WITH MAKING A MOBILE SANDBOX GAME Thread

Hi there!

I want to create a sandbox game like Terraria or Starbound for mobile and I need tips on where to start.

Our story

I help run a community of 22,000 awesome gamers. We have a forum, we chat and we have a lot of fun. Recently, the game developer of our favorite game moved on to developing other projects. Our community has an incredible desire to reconnect on a new a game but we can’t find anything that fits our casual style.

What we know

We would really love to create a terraria-like sandbox game that could be multiplatform. The developer of a game we love suggested Unity and C#. We also have GameMaker studio and some great assets there.

We know game development is hard and making so we want to start by doing a smaller related project that could still inspire but be much more basic. We want to do something like Minecraft/Terraria etc. with mining and building but with a casual and peaceful feel.

The question

What is the smallest project we could do in which we could learn the most relevant stuff to building the kind of games we love?

Are there some related tutorials you could point us to?

Thanks for helping newbies like us!

Hey JennyAlive3,

concentrating on what is important right now and trying to break your idea down to the basics is already the right way to go. While I cannot give you any advice on the Unity and C# vs. GameMaker question, I want to emphasize the consequences of going for a multiplatform support. This has massive positive aspects, but you also need to keep in mind that this comes with heavy costs in the maintenance later on. Everything has to be tested on all devices every time, some bugs are going to be device specific. This raises the need for proper bug tracking quite a bit, aswell. I am not saying that it would be the wrong way to go that route, I just want you to be aware of the additional work this comes with. Is this really necessary for the first version?

I do not have any specific tutorials in mind, but have you checked YouTube yet? There are quite a few tutorials for game development in many different areas.

Best wishes,

Kjell

Edited by: iqew

Well, iQew is correct. You should try to plan everything out first and what is more important. You haven't exactly stated the dimensions of the game, 3D or 2D. Multiplatforming is also a problem. First, make the first versions IOS only cause there are only like 20-30 IOS devices which makes it easier to troubleshoot device specific bugs. Second plan the artwork theme. Since you plan on a casual feel, use bright colors to bring out the happiness. Then are there monsters in the game? Monsters shouldn't look to horrifying. I'd like to say more, but I'm to lazy to type on my phone. If you want I can make a small document or plan of how to make or how you should make you game.