#13 Learning Game Dev - Week One

The ceremonial first shovel of a new build site.

A short one today, as I’m heading off back home to Asia tomorrow to celebrate the Lunar New Year for two weeks.

Finished off that flappy bird clone - it can be played on a computer web browser, check it out!

I ran into some problems when building the game for web - my first few attempts would take beyond 30 minutes, and would essentially crash when I would try to cancel the process. I posted my frustrations in real-time on bluesky - some settings before the build seemed to either significantly slow it down to the point of not-feasable, whereas others seemed to be what made it tick, ultimately taking about 9 minutes for a first build and then 30 seconds or so afterwards.

Overall it was good to go through the entire basic pipeline of finishing a game and putting it out there. I’m definitely much more comfortable with Unity, and far more ready to start the next project. Speaking of which…

I’ve spent the past few days coming up with the game I want to spend the next 10-ish weeks on! A lot of brainstorming on paper, and playing other games. It’s a really fun process. I’m trying not to over-scope, which means focusing on what I want to get better at and have the game represent.

The working title is “Garb”, because I’m currently heavily inspired by “Tunic” and because the name sounds interesting to me. It was the first thing that popped into my head! Just a working title for now, but I like how short it is.

The basic 30-second pitch is as follows:

Garb is an isometric 3D dungeon crawler in which you play as a character whose only weapon is a projectile that gets increasingly powerful the more you successfully throw and catch. The chief inspirations are Tunic, Draven from League of Legends, and Hades.

That’s all I’ve got right now. And I’m going to be focusing on animation, gameplay and feel. That means that a lot of art will be low on the priority list - I’ll be happy if I have a prototype of around 10 minutes that feels great to play, with grey-boxed levels.

Before I flew tomorrow I wanted to start the project in some meaningful way - just to plant the seed somewhere, somehow - so I created the git repo and the unity project, and placed in a reference to a player! It feels like the ceremonial first shovel of the site of a new building.

I won’t be able to get any game dev done over the next two weeks as I’ll have access to only my iPad. I’m missing the Global Game Jam (though I found out yesterday that there’s a Godot for iPad - Xogot! Fascinating). So I’m going to keep working things through on paper, and crucially I’m going to spend the 13-hour long flights playing games! I’ve got Dave the Diver to finish, Thank Goodness You’re Here to start, and Monument Valley on the iPad. Tunic IS on the Switch but I can’t bring myself to shell out £25 and start from the beginning, so it’ll have to wait til I’m back.

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Some things I’ve been really enjoying, to round out this blog post:

Brackeys! - a truly excellent resource on Unity, Godot and game dev. I love his teaching style and his personality. Whenever I’m confused about a new topic, such as the difference between URP and HDRP in Unity - the first thing I do is see if Brackey’s has made a video on it. Chances are, he usually has, and it usually does the trick! I used his videos on high-scores, audio and general C# programming on the flappy bird clone.

The Banshees of Inisherin - a great, hilarious movie. I loved this!

Dishonored 2 Level Design Test - an excellent video on level design! A great watch to introduce the level design process into my own workflow, and for this next game.

That’s broadly it! I’ll write more in the new year. Happy Year of the Snake - 恭喜發財!