bigwhoopstudios

This is my first blog post ever! So Ill start at the beginning. Ive been into computer games ever since my early days on an Atari 2600. But Monkey Island 2 was the game that really made me sit up and take notice of games. (Even though it did come on 12 floppy disks). For the past year or two I've been attempting to make games solo in my limited free time. I spend more time reading about games and learning how to make them than actually playing them.

Now I needed to choose a framework to learn and develop on. I came across a great book called Beginning Android Games by Mario Zechner. It walked through the creation of a basic game framework for android. From there I moved up to his libgdx engine. I had built a basic jumping game and a kids memory matching game for android. I thought then that I was ready. I could write my own riff on an FTL style game for android. But the amount of work needed was not something I had expected. What might seem like a relatively simple game to create takes massive amounts of design,planning and assets not to mention learning all the systems required to actually implement the thing. I was quite disheartened by that and left the project gather dust on a shelf.

Soon after a group of us from a games forum entered the Edge Getting Into Games with Unity competition. The brief was to design a game based on the phrase "Do No Harm".
So we brainstormed and eventually my idea for the design was chosen. The idea was to have a game set on a space ship with the player controlling an android. The android was programmed not to harm humans. Surprise surprise the ship was overtaken by pirates. So the player had to safely incapacitate the pirates and free the crew. The game would be very tongue in cheek.
However we totally underestimated the complexity of the project. A few members of the team were very experienced in unity and one guy in particular was amazing at the graphics side. We modelled decks of the ship and even built some working puzzles. Enemy pirates had AI and it all looked rather nice. So we built a prototype level and submitted to the competition. We didn't even get a mention in the magazine. We had totally misjudged the scale of the competition. The winner was a mobile game with a very simple concept,basic graphics etc but was instantly playable. We were hugely disappointed and the whole experience taught us all a big lesson.
I learned a lot about how to judge the scope of a project. Take for example an enemy in a 3D game. This might sound obvious but an enemy typically will have at a minimum a model which will need to be textured,animation,sounds and artificial intelligence. Thats a lot of work especially for lone developers that may need to go and learn 3DS Max or Blender to create the model of the enemy. That isnt exactly a trivial task especially if you are making games as a hobby while holding down a full time job/family life etc.
Start building small, uncomplicated games. Keep building them and you will naturally start adding elements as you go, constantly improving and increasing the scope. Actually finishing a project is a big confidence boost. Plus it means you can get your game out there, get people playing and hopefully receive valuable feedback.