planning - Rockslide Studios Development Blog

Initial setup

After deciding on the high level idea of what I wanted the game to be I started working on the setup that I would use to create the game, the original game was created using the unity engine and I knew I wanted to continue using Unity, I would also use GIT as my source control solution and created a repository for it and finally I would need a project management tool, I chose hacknplan for that and created the board for the new project.

I have been using GIT for years now and the initial set up was quite easy everything went without problems, the only thing I now regret is importing the original game files into the new project, I eventually removed all the files from the original game and it would have been much easier to start from an empty project and managed a separate project with the original files.

Initial work on the game according to git started 1 of August 2019

In terms of planning I set up a simple kanban board on hacknplan because of the way I’m going to work on the game, which is basically after hours when I have the time to work on it, might be an hour a day or 15 minutes I don’t know, I prefer to have a list of tasks that I need to achieve regardless of sprints since I can’t guaranty I will have time to work on it, I did eventually start using sprints so I could track work that I did, this and the git history allowed me to see periods of time I didn’t have time to work on the game.

After getting all of this set up, I went to the Unity project made sure that the game worked, which it didn’t I had to fix some issues with deprecated methods and after the project was fixed, I started writing down the first set of objectives that I wanted to get done for the game.

Why and where to start

So why did I think that this idea would be so interesting and why did I choose this game? Well a lot changed in the last 5 years, I managed to finally start working in the gaming industry I wanted to see how much I learned during this time and I wanted to see if I had to do a similar game what would I have done differently.

I also wanted to learn more about what it takes to make a game from top to bottom. I have worked as a programmer for the last 10 years and my area of expertise is programming, but I wanted to force myself to learn other disciplines. Creating a video game requires multiple skills from art to sound, to design and narrative, and even though I luck enough to work with a lot of talented people that have been in game dev for more than 20 years, our skill set does not overlap and sometimes its hard to understand the needs of other teams, I wanted to take the opportunity to wear multiple hats and try and understand other peoples problems, while still needing to fix my own problems, what could go wrong.

Currently working at Cloud Imperium Games

That being said I started to look at the game and decided that I wanted to keep the look of it, I would keep the 2D top down look and I also wanted to keep the same combat style so it would still be an action game. Some things that I did want to change were how the dungeons looked I still want them to be procedurally generated but I didn’t want to have the traditional square or rectangle shape dungeons so I had to find a solution to create organic looking dungeons, I also didn’t want to have an infinite amount of dungeon like the original game I wanted to move more towards an RPG game, with a story line and maybe an inventory system, at this point I still wasn’t very sure what mechanics to add because it would make the game too much different from the original.

I also had to find a solution for the art assets as well as the sound assets since I couldn’t use the ones from the original game, luckily at the time there was a humble bundle that had both art and sound that I liked for the game, I knew that I could use them but I would also need to create many more assets if I wanted to have a good looking game.

Picking a new project

About a year ago I was looking for game ideas to try and work on a new game, I thought about creating a game based on past game that I made and see what the difference were and how much I changed in terms of game development and I thought it was a good idea and decided to see it through.

I had to pick a game or at least a playable prototype (I don’t finish many projects), and I choose a game I did 5 years ago, I participated in a game jam called banana jam sponsored by a studio in Portugal called Nerd Monkeys, I was part of the team that created a game called “Always pay the troll toll”, the game was a top down dungeon crawler, with procedurally generated dungeons and I was the programmer on it. I played the game recently to remember what I did and noticed it had a lot of issues but that makes sense, the team that I work with was made of people from other teams that didn’t finish the game jam, including my own team which I was trying to manage, so managing to release a playable game in a fragment of the time other teams had to do it is actually quite good.

So I took the game we created for the game jam as the reference point of what I wanted to do and started thinking about how would I do it now, what would I change about it and if I could make it better (without changing it too much). I also did not want to use the art or the sound because they don’t belong to me but I could use the code files which I had created, spoiler alert I didn’t keep any of the existing code, all of them were deleted and replaced, I expected as much, a lot of things can change in 5 years and hopefully I’m better now than I was 5 years ago.

I will try and breakdown development in the following days… stay tuned…