Welcome!
So I’ve set up the blog, which wouldn’t normally be the first step in making a game. But I’m hoping that this will help to focus my activities and give a purpose.
Because I want to document the whole process, I’m going to start from scratch, so the first steps are to make some decisions:
- What do I want to write?
- How I want to deliver it?
The second of these is simpler. As this is a blog based game development, I need to be able to show the results. So this must be a web based game at least as it’s first delivery method. I should make sure I keep in mind I may want to consider other platforms in the future, such as Steam or Mobile.
The first of these is sometimes one of the hardest decisions in games. Despite what people may think, ideas are two a penny – I’ve seen forum posts where people literally list ideas that they don’t have time to develop. So to narrow it down, I first want to pick a genre.
For this I’ve decided to look at idle games. Some of my favourite time wasting games have been things like Kittens Game or things like Realm Grinder on Kongregate or Steam. This has the advantage of being easy to get started, having plenty of small things that can be developed initially, but still having all of the features you would expect of a fully fledged game – an input system, output system, storage, menus, theme/story, balancing etc.
So this is where I’ll start. I think the next step is to think about theming, and work out what we are going to do with the game. The other thing for me to think about this week is platform – what language should I use?