To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to write a dev-log so soon, if at all. Like most developers, I’d rather work on a game than write about a game. But due to some happenstances, I’m away from my desktop and will have to settle for writing about the game instead. Perhaps it will be worthwhile, if just to have a log of what I’ve done; after all, prototypes, learning and research aren’t considered time well spent until one has something to show for it. It’s not really true, but it’s also very true! I’ll hope that by the end of this little journey, I’ll have something I can fondly look back upon, and having my plans laid out in this blog might help me get there.
So – I’m making a videogame! It’s a game I’m making for… well, the sake of making a game. It’s been a long-time dream of mine to say that I’ve made a game. That’s not to say I haven’t already made games before, but with reflection, I’d like to make something less abstract than what I’ve been known for in recent memory. No, the goal this time is to make something well-understood. Obvious. Orthodox. Not a mod, a platform, a tabletop ruleset, a website, or a game made out of website formatting. Just a quick, ordinary videogame in a familiar format that anyone can digest as a ‘videogame’.
My target goals are fairly concise to start. We’ll add real constraints once I’m certain of what I’m making, but until then, we have the following:
- Pick the simplest concept that I feel I can make valuable.
- Make it playable in a web browser (and ideally on a phone too).
- Capitalize on my main skill – which I believe is mechanical design.
Simple, firstly so that the game is accessible, and secondly to keep the scope as small as I can. I’m defining ‘value’ as a game that someone will show interest in throwing any amount of money at it; this does inflate the scope a bit, but having hit this milestone before, I think it’s a manageable goal. Web playable, because I’d like it to be as accessible as possible. And finally, a focus on my forte, because I will likely be developing this solo, and therefore should minimize how many new skills I’ll need to develop to make a competent game.
So, what exactly will the game be? I bounced around a few platformer ideas at first, until realizing I could potentially go even simpler than that; soon after, the codename ‘Project Rotator’ was born. This much is set in stone: the game will be an Asteroids-like top-down space game where you destroy objects by flying your ship in a circle around them. Simple enough, right?
The concept is (very) vaguely drawn from a Flash game named Spin Doctor, in which a flying ship would shoot at color-coded enemies to spin them around – and spinning two enemies of the same color fast enough would destroy them as a pair. I distinctly remember thinking all those years ago, ‘what if the ship had to fly around the discs in order to spin them?’ It seemed like a much more visceral mechanic in my mind, and now I have an excuse to give it a try. The early prototypes feel both promising and challenging from a design point of view, and I’ll hope to talk more about them soon.
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