Introducing Bidean Rise

This post is a very short introduction to this blog. I recently began work on a new game and thought it might be fun to write about the process. This is more for me than for anyone else at this point. I work full time and so progress is likely to vary over time.

So what is the vision? Aesthetically I really like Zero Sievert. I also like the weight of the game, it feels serious and is difficult. From a gameplay style I envisage a sort of 4x medieval world. You play one character but you can build a community and fight other factions, conquer their lands etc. I have some vague ideas about an alternating control system, where you have a command mode and can control your followers in some form.

That’s it really, I’m just going to start building. The vision is both vague and overly ambitious probably, but it is what it is.

I’ve attempted to make some games before, and never finished anything. I’ve learned some things each time though and hopefully that increases my odds of success marginally. What kind of things have I learned?

• Art is not my strength. I might possibly be able to do pixel art but it’s going to be a lot of learning before I do anything half good. I saw a comment somewhere that if your game isn’t fun with blocks, it won’t be fun with nice art. So my plan is to focus on the fundamentals and make something playable with no art at all. I played Zero Sievert recently and thought it was an art style I could possibly achieve. The developer worked it out, so maybe I can too. Alternatively, I can pay someone else to do it.
• Trying to do it all will mean I definitely fail. I’m going to use Unity as I have familiarity with it. There’s an asset store and I want to leverage things that save me time. I likely won’t use much art however as I prefer that to be unique.
• Keep fundamentals in mind as I build. One of my earliest projects with unity I built a semi decent tech demo. It was kind of like theme hospital. However I totally neglected the idea of saving the game and loading back up again. Coming at this after the fact was extremely difficult and I had to unravel a lot of it. For this project I want to treat such things as first class citizens.

The last thing I have is my early goals:

• Have multiple levels I can traverse with a playable character in a top down game style.
• Have a chest which generates loot on first access. The player can move loot between their inventory and the chest inventory.
• The player has stats such as health, stamina, hunger, thirst.
• All of the above goals are persistable and can be reloaded between sessions.

I’ve already chosen to use an asset called top down engine by More Mountains. That gives me goal 1 straight off and parts of goals 2 and 3 — but all of that requires some tweaking to suit my goals.

That’s all for the intro. The next blog will detail my progress for the above goals and what I plan to do next.