The creation of the game on your eyes — part 1: Idea, vision, choice of setting, platform, distribution models, etc

Introduction

This article is the first of a planned series of articles devoted to the development, design and development of our games. I am deliberately not going to name any names of the project, or give a link to the post does not hit the “I'm a PR”. Yes, in fact, still PR is really nothing, because the project is in the beginning and we plan to pass this way together with those who are interested to watch the kitchen true-indie.

This cycle is conceived as a live dev-log games indie project. Here I plan to tell all that will meet on the way from decisions on choice of setting, game design and art to the technical implementation of all it business.

a Little about us and our goals

A year and a half ago I already wrote on Habre about our gamedev startup. Then I spoke about our attempts to enter the game development through the social sector. Attempts failovich. What has changed since then? It was after that article we found interesting offer and recently worked on the sitibilder under mobile platforms on Unity. Not to say that it was just what we wanted and it really wasn't indie, because in fact — we just worked in the other company. But this partnership has helped us through a difficult period in our lives. Now we continue to supportit this sitibilder, but still we wanted to go back to something of his, warm and lamp.

So, what do we come to this point?

We had: the office, two programmers, one artist, one technical artist (she is an accountant, she is the master of all trades who can help with documents, texts, etc.), some free time, a great zeal and desire to do something different and interesting and of course — idea.

As for financial part of the event, then work on the sitibilder mountains of gold to no avail. We have some income, but it is highly unstable, so to do 100% our new project, we can not, and still continue to survive and not give up.

About the game — from idea to concept.

I saw the picture in the beginning of the post? Now, I will try to explain.

It all started with the fact that Nikita (@Dartius) came up with the phrase “I invented the fucking game.” To be honest, with his first words I thought this kind of nonsense. But then the more I thought about it the more I liked the idea and concept.

The idea is to do like GameDev Story about an action hero of the 80-90s. Roughly speaking, about rocky. To make a game, where would you go from victory to victory cuts through to the top building your unique hero. Spice it all with humor and lots of references to films and other works of those years. In General, play on nostalgia.

For example, got to deliver a pizza and met with a local analogue of the teenage mutant ninja turtles.

Anyway, the idea seemed quite original. You start in the garage and participate in street battles. You the morning drink a cocktail of raw eggs and go train.

Do you work out, buy new equipment, are constantly faced with various quests-eventime, get a lot of perks type “long-armed” (+2 to long-range strikes) or “racist” (+2 strength against blacks). Yes, Hello Fallout! And move on to his dream of becoming the best...

So, the target audience were selected, which in 90-e years have come from “rocky” watched “Ninja Turtles” and played on his “Dandy”. That is essentially hardcore. After all, we ourselves are and the easier the game itself is fun to play.

Then I will provide such a picture. We need to decide all the components and make sure each other complies with.

Moving on. Visual style. Logically, aiming at an audience and wanting to evoke nostalgic feelings, we chose our style of pixel art.

Here, to seed a little art:

references to "rocky"

references to teenage mutant Ninja Turtles and fighter Zangief from Street Figther

So, let us imagine our potential player and will check, whether all is correct and whether there are such people:
* The young man 25-35 years old
* Watched “rocky” and played “Street fighter”
* Interested in computer games and indie
* Plays on PC (Steam)
* Prefer a premium model protoplay
* Love pixel art

Like, is that all is well and converges. However, focusing on this audience, we think the game can be interesting and more to the masses. Even references to the nostalgia of the 80's and 90's — it's just a nice detail, but not defining for the gameplay factor.

some description of the game.

Probably, having read this far, you have not really imagine how it will be played. Let me write a few words about the gameplay.
So, we have a hero that has some characteristics (strength, endurance, etc.), money and from the very beginning — a couple of perks a La Fallout. And then you start to go to work, earn money, rock out in your garage with the materials at hand, to buy new equipment, get tired, sleep, eat, again to run to work and again to train.

And from time to time to participate in some fights. The fight itself (at least at the moment) see zero-player-fighting'ohms. That is all that you can do and configure — you will need to do before the fight. To provide guidance on the degree of aggressiveness, the preference shock, etc. And then just watch.

During this process, you are constantly faced with some quests and eventime. He worked as a paperboy and broke the window in the mob? Will have to work off the debt in fights. Or met a strange man, telling about the cooked soap and underground fights. And it can be learned that brother died, and acquired the ability at the crucial moment to remember a deceased relative and pulling almost lost the battle.

Can't beat the opponent? Try to pre-buy information about his weaknesses, or for example poison his beloved hamster.

Just don't be surprised then acquired a negative perk and cows falling on your head.

Technical implementation.

I think I will surprise nobody if I say that we will use Unity. The reasons are a million here and experience, and a great and flexible development environment, multiplatform (for a start we are interested with your Steam Window/Mac/Linux, and then maybe to gamers it comes).

Well, besides not so long ago we did a small game for the week on the competition on speed game-the virgin (about which I also wrote on Habre), where he took first places in two nominations, for which he received from the hands of Wozik two licenses of Unity Pro.

What can I say? 2D in unity now has a built-in, will try it. GUI, unfortunately, not yet (however, promise that's it), so I have to use NGUI.

Plans

We've nurtured our concept and details of game design. It is now time for implementation.

And here is the way turned up hasjem from Kanobu. It was announced just yesterday, and it will last for a month. So this is a great reason to take up the case. In a month we want to make a minimum playable version. Moreover, the artist is working already for months and some amount of art we already have.

Also, we want to try to develop publicly. Keep your own dev log, post, tweet any news, sketches, screens. To publish a series of articles on habré — about game design, about nuances, unity, and indeed about everything interesting that will come our way.

And lastly — another piece of art for the authorship of our irreplaceable artist:

As you can see, the hero hangs the posters from “rocky” and “bloodsport” on the wall, eating cereal with Mr. T., and he pushes up on one arm and a lot of this stuff.

PS: the Topic is still moved in "I PR", so I'll add a link: www.VHStory.com

All articles in this series:

Article based on information from habrahabr.ru

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