I wanna make a game!

I expressed this thought the other day but I’d love to make a game of my own. I doubt it would be good… But I’d love to try and put some of the knowledge I have to use. The only issue here is, however, that I have no clue about how to do it, so I asked a dev I know about any tips and he recommended C++/C# and Unity to me!

And well, the tutorials that are out there on Unity are pretty great, I’ve been told, and most of them kinda teach you C# as well, meaning that I can get into lots of the stuff that I need to learn. Furthermore, I’d love to create something that makes others happy. I mean, I love roguelikes and dungeon crawlers and weirdly enough, I love “Pong”, so I’d like to kinda create a mishmash of all of those things and call it a day once I’m satisfied with it.

The biggest inspiration for the idea of making a game, however, has been Isle of Jura! It’s got nothing to do with what I had in mind in terms of game design but I’ve talked to the developer a little bit on my stream and they said that they developed it after their work across half a year, which is astonishing. I would love to sit down and learn the ropes and see what’s behind the game development process… and I’d like to do that every now and then, potentially write about cool things I learned, and eventually release the game on itch.io for the high price of *free*. Maybe people will play it, maybe they won’t? Either way, I’d love it if whatever I end up creating (if I do stick it out) makes people happy.

But yeah, the idea I had in mind was a somewhat simplistic take on the dungeon crawling genre with roguelike mechanics and a procedurally or randomly generated world. Fights would be determined via Pong and as you explore the world and move to different biomes, you pick up power-ups that give your platform special properties. Different enemies also have abilities and properties to them that make each “battle” fun and intriguing. Battles would be decided either by health points or by a scoring system, meaning that you could whittle down your opponent’s health by using your abilities – or you score points and try to tough it out until the time runs out. Honestly, Pong in itself may not be the most intriguing idea in the world for this so I could see myself dropping it as time goes on if it’s too difficult to make it intriguing and fun… but I’d love to give it a go, honestly.

The most important thing for me would be the synergies. I love it when different items or abilities synergize with each other. In Isaac, you have tear effects that work in a variety of manners. In Risk of Rain 2, your ignition tank may empower your fire effects from abilities, Runald’s or Gasoline. Similarly, you can create whole builds utilizing various strengths of items in that game, creating synergies with your character as time goes on. Also, I’d like to refrain from a class system but rather give players the option to build their own class of sorts with different options.

In the end, I’d like to keep it simple and then build on a solid base but all the ideas I have for a game are probably too complex at the moment, so I’ll have to tweak it and see what Unity allows me to do. If I ever get stuck somewhere, I’ll probably rely on people I know for their advice on tech stuff. I’m looking forward to the whole process and getting a glimpse at how things are done as time goes on. I feel like it could be cool to create something even if it’s janky and goofy at best in the end.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!