There have been a couple of times when I’ve installed Unity and dabbled just enough to get my feet wet. I’ve decided to go more in depth and really try to learn for myself the ins and outs of game development.
After working through about 15-20 hours worth of tutorials I finally decided to hash out an idea. By this time I had learned the basics of creating a first person shooter including enemies and game mechanics such as stamina or health.
I figured the next step would be world-making. After giving myself a headache trying to use blender, I put that to the side in exchange for a flat plane to test on and built out item classes that would allow the player to pick up items and add them to an inventory system.
As I worked through these first stages of simultaneous learning and idea-developing I landed on one that I believe would set the stage for myself as a new developer as well as the game.
Scratch. The concept was born out of simply wanting to create everything “from scratch” rather than piece together a bunch of Unity Assets and spit out a game that was cobbled together from others’ creations.
The second aspect to this is the storyline itself, a working concept. You find yourself entering consciousness in a crashed ship and discover in the logs to have narrowly escaped a cataclysmic event of some kind on your home world. The ship is in bad shape, you have no idea where you are, and you’re left with no resources and must start anew, from scratch.
The format will be a semi open-world concept with crafting and building functionality. Player mechanics include typical health and energy (stamina), with stats, wearables, consumables, and character leveling. Multiplayer is not in the picture at this time, but there are storyline tangents in mind that will lead to that being included down the road.
So far I’ve managed to create a large terrain with mountains, forests, roads, water bodies, desert, and more. Other than all the aforementioned components that’s about where I’ve gotten with close to 17 hours of actual work put in thus far. That’s not including the approximate 25-30 hours total I’ve put into tutorials and practicing on test scenes.
I’m excited to expand my skills and enter into the world of game development. If this game ends up being played by only a few, then I’ll be happy. If it goes further, then that would be great too. My entire purpose with this game is to expand my knowledge and learn as much as I can without relying on prebuilt assets from others. That being said, I do use some textures and prefabs for world generation, but plan to replace them with my own creations as I develop the 3d modeling side of my abilities.
Stay tuned for more updates. Progress may be slow, but this may turn out to be quite the adventure.