My first game I ever made in Flash, Spitfires, is 5 years old today. Horrific today but oh so proud of it at the time. With a bit more actionscript experience under the belt, I decided to improve on it resulting in a WIP Spitfires 2.
Good times..
So! Two weeks ago I started drowning my head with ideas for this project I mentioned in my previous post. Spending evenings going through mods and game engines to find both what I want to do and how I'd want to do it.
The idea for the mod would have to be somewhat simple in design. The development process should have a designated end point in which the mod is ready for release and no further additions made on it, exceptions for bug fixing, if there should be any ( there always are ).
I'd require the game engine to be easy and simple enough for me to do most of the work by my self, and I'd prefer it to have some sort of an editor and to have good documents on how to use it. There's an old Icelandic saying: "Í upphafi skal endinn skoða" or, translated to English: "In the beginning one should consider the end". With that in mind, I figure, when it comes to publishing, I want to be able to reach as many people as I can, releasing on a game that is either popular or recent.
I've checked C&C engines and Starcraft for RTS kind of mod. I've looked a bit into Source and Unreal for some sort of an FPS kind of mod, Torchlight for an adventure hack n' slash, the list goes on. After spending a week of evenings on studying in which direction I should go/could go, writing ideas and rewriting, asking for opinions and deciding, I have the idea and the engine to go with it.
The Idea: Spitfires 3.
The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. An original game I created my self a long time ago. I'm already familiar with the design of it, the concept, the game design. Fun, Arcadish, Simple casual game you can grab and play for a couple of minutes.
The Engine: Unity 3d.
During one of those evenings of studying mods and games, I ended up on the game engine section at ModDB which reminded me of Unity's existence. I had been fortunate enough to meet and talk with David Helgason, the CEO of Unity, around last Christmas when he did a presentation at an IGI evening so I'm somewhat familiar with the engine. In fact, I think this could be the perfect engine for this project. It's easy to learn and simple enough to use, it has a giant community and support and there's a free version of it I could work with. What's better is it also supports playing it's games through a web browser. I just expanded my player base to about 1.73 billion people.
The Change: From a mod to a Indie.
It's no longer a mod, as there's no game to modify. This project just turned into an Indie game. But with those two things settled, Spitfires 3 on Unity 3d, I have 2 new objectives. To learn how to use the Unity engine, and to write the Game Design Document for it.
There's no time like the present.
