In the third part of this series on getting into hobby game development, I'm going to try to do an in-depth tutorial of how we can go about planning a game dev project, which I argue is really critical to getting started, especially if your new to programming or using computers in general. If you're not sure why I think planning is so important, please spend a minute with the previous video in this series.
As a brief recap of what I said there, if you're struggling to make games it could be because you don't really have a solid idea of like, what a game is and how to learn the fundamental skills needed to make them. I'm hoping I can help you start to see your creative game ideas as a series of technical problems to solve, and that's what we'll be focusing on today. Planning out and breaking down a game idea is a skill in of itself, but I hope this approach will be most helpful to the most people. If it doesn't make sense or isn't that helpful, please reach out in the comments! If I get good feedback, I might be able to offer other suggestions, or help you figure out something that works better for you.
Anyway, let's get into it. I'll start by telling you about a game idea I have, then I'll try to break it down into a the big ideas, like the main features of out game. Next, we'll try to think about each of the problems and make them into smaller and smaller and smaller tasks, until we can't really make them any smaller. Lastly, we'll try to decide which parts of the game are most important, and give a priority rating to each small task.
After all that work, we'll be left with a really powerful document, that we'll be able to use to help us gauge how long the project will take, and give us a clear idea of exactly what we should be doing everytime we have time to work on our project. Best of all, it we can use it to keep track of our progress, which can be a really powerful motivator.
Okay, so enough talk, let's do the thing.
Here's my idea... I imagined a game that is really similar to the old Legend of Zelda games, but with a twist, which is that instead of accumulating an arsenal of tools and weapons that make you more powerful as you progress, you could only hold one item at a time, and could solve puzzles and fight enemies with any of them, but it would change your strategy.
For example, you might have to travel through a corridor where fireballs shoot from holes in the walls. You could use the shield to block the fire balls by facing them when they hit you. Or, you could use the sword to swat them away, but if you get the timing wrong you'll get hit. Or maybe you can use an item that makes you move really quickly, and simply dodge the fireballs, but of course it would be a bit tricky to control.
And I thought it would be cool to make a game based on a series of fantasy books I read as a kid called "Redwall" by Brian Jaqcues. The characters in this story are all animals like mice or snakes, but they live in a medieval england kind of setting. So maybe it will be a story of a brave mouse knight who saves the day, or something like that.
Okay, so the way I'm going to suggest we start planning out this idea is to make a chart, and there's a couple ways we could do this. I'll show you how we can draw it, or use a text editor.
Watch along with me for a bit, and then please try it yourself once you think you get it.
Once we've written down our big ideas, we'll try to think of all the things we'll need to know how to do in order to make that work. The reality, especially when we're starting out, we not have any idea at all what goes into making music for our game or whatever. That's okay! Just try to think through as much as you can now. As we tackle these issues, we'll be doing research, and that's how we'll figure out what we need to do. At that point we might even update our chart to reflect that new knowledge.
For now, let's put the final touches on this thing, which is to order it by priority. If you're doing this in writing, we can try organizing the features first. So I'll basically keep asking myself 'is this something the game could in theory exist without?', like, what things are required to even be playable? So for example, our game can be playable without music. It might be a lot less fun to play, but we can save it for later in the project. On the other hand, drawing characters is really important, so that should probably be near the top of the list.
Okay, so then, I can just do the same thing for all the tasks needed to complete each feature. So, I really need to finish each of these items, since that's a big part of the game's concept, but are there some that might be harder to complete, or more important than others? I think the sword might be the hardest out the items I have so far, but Swapping items is also really important. Hmmm... We'll I think I'll leave it like this for now. I can always change it later.
Okay, whew. That took a minute, but like I said before we just set ourselves up for success in a big way. Let's stop here for now. Good work!
In the next sermon, we'll talk about how to use this document, and talk about how we're actually going to make this game! Goodbye for now, Katy signing off.