I've been dragging my feet, but I've decided to start making my own game. I've chosen to make an action-adventure side scroller as I have some pretty cool ideas that I'll explain more as this blog develops.
I'm doing all this for myself right now. Maybe eventually it will be playable by other people and then maybe a long time after that I can see if anyone wants to give me money for it. For now, I'm not worrying about that. Just enjoying the process and the act of documenting it here.
You will notice that the art I'm using is nothing to be proud of yet, which might come as a surprise for anyone that knows me. However, I am making a point of not spending time to make this look like anything for a while. In my experience with professional game development, art has often come too soon and been more important than design and gameplay. I blame this on the publisher/developer relationship that is the norm in game development today. The need to impress a publisher with pretty visuals can often outweigh gameplay and in turn cause it to suffer.
Here are some notes about what I'm using for this project and some stuff I have done so far:
I have been developing using Unreal for many years, so with the new subscription model, using Unreal 4 seemed like the natural choice.
I also have a huge, glass closet door that doubles as a white board. It's pretty cool.
Starting with the side scroller project that comes with Unreal 4, my first task was to expand on the basic movement that is included. Here is a list of the tasks I gave myself:
- Walk - included
- Jump - included
- Run - Hold a button to move faster DONE
- Crouch - Press a button to become "half height" DONE
- Slide - Press crouch while running to slide for a short distance DONE
- Crawl - move while crouched DONE
- Grab ledge - jump to a ledge and grab it if the jump is missed DONE
- Climb - Climb a ladder
You can now run/jump, crouch, and hang. As seen here:
Thanks for reading and I hope you'll enjoy hearing about my failures, successes, and process.
My next post will be about ledge hanging and dropping, and exactly how I went about figuring out how to make it happen.
