Making My First Open World Game | Devlog #1

hi I'm Ryan and I'm making an open world indie game inspired by games like Final Fantasy Legend of Zelda and a short hike welcome to my devlog [Music] I should probably tell you about me I'm an electrical engineer turn programmer I live in California and love spending time with my wonderful wife and our two crazy kids I grew up playing video games still enjoy playing them so it was only natural I started developing my own video games I've released five games on mobile but never had that big hit that launches my career as a game developer my favorite types of games to play are big role-playing games like the Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda games I thought I'd need a big team of developers to make the big open world game I've always wanted to make then I recently played a short hike short hike was developed by one guy and it's a Marvel really good gameplay a fun world to explore and an amazing story this is the game that taught me that short games are a thing and they should be a thing I have a full-time job of two little kids I don't have time for a 60 hour Elden ring experience but a two to three hour game I could play in one evening yeah I could do that [Music] gameplay something I'm super excited about is the game story the premise is that you've recently moved into your own place place just for you and your dog you have a dog that night you have a dream about The Surreal kind of world with talking animals glowing plants and these crystals called night stones that instantly change day to night and night to day that sort of thing problem is when you wake up you're stuck in this world the world is beautiful and peaceful but you have to find a way back home to your poor pup along the way you'll find some Advanced pieces of tech built by someone the locals refer to as the Oracle the Oracle is almost finished building a portal that can bring you home but the Oracle hasn't been seen for many years it's rumored that Oracle had a journal with the plans for finishing the portal if you can find the journal you can finish the portal and that's your ticket back home I think it'd be cool if different animal races could offer you different abilities we can talk more about that later but the ability I for sure want to mention is that the owls teach you how to fly I love flying mechanics in open world games I think it'd be a lot of fun to develop and play with this mechanic what the main quests to take about three hours which is shorter than a big AAA title but since this is still longer than the typical movie I think it's enough time to really immerse the player in the story so with those Concepts in place let's start developing during these devlog videos I'll show you how I turn this into this if you want to follow the progress and support me I'd really appreciate if you give me a like and a subscribe thanks so much [Music] the game engine I'm using for this project is Unity I feel like it's really important to prototype my Concepts as early as possible I always have an idea of how something will look and feel but my feeling is rarely right getting something I can play with helps me understand what I actually need to do so I grabbed this character from the unity asset store because it kind of reminds me of cloud from Final Fantasy VII and I'm hoping to have some of that old school charm in my game I'll attach the unity character controller to get a move and wow this is looking pretty terrible but after developing for years on mobile I find it super satisfying to be using an actual Gamepad controller now I'll download some animations from mixamo.com so the character can run and jump finally I'll import a package called cinemachine that allows me to easily configure a camera to follow the player I don't have the camera follow the player but instead I have it follow something I call the character ghost the character ghost will be invisible in the game but I'm showing it as this red capsule for prototyping you can see the character goes smoothly lags behind the player and filters out any quick and jerky movement the character makes this so give the player a smooth and satisfying camera experience during gameplay now I need to give my running and jumping character some terrain to explore instead of the flat plane of boring nothingness he is currently running around on I mean I guess I could leave it like this and make the most boring game possible but what would be the fun in that Unity has some pretty impressive terrain building tools and that's what I'll be using to shape this world something I want to start working on right away is the triplanar Shader for the terrain I've set up this basic example with a rock and you can see the grasp always remains on the top of the rock no matter how I rotate it is the basic premise of a tripliner Shader and I want to use this type of Shader to texture my terrain because it colors the objects automatically I want the world to be big and if I want to see this game finished in my lifetime I'll need help painting it and here is the player running around some elevated terrain it looks pretty Barren without any nature but I am definitely starting to get a feel for World building the last thing I want to talk about in this episode is water I want this world to have a lot of water it's fun to look at and it's fun to play in so I think it's important to have it in my open world game fluid simulation is computationally expensive and they won't make game to run on the most basic Hardware so I'll need to create water that looks real but doesn't take a lot of resources I want rivers and waterfalls and that adds a layer of complexity because these meshes will need to fit in perfectly with the terrain I suppose I could export the terrain into blender build the rivers then import the rivers back into Unity that's a pretty bad workflow since I'll constantly be switching between two programs so the first thing I'll do is create a custom script that lets me build the rivers directly in unity the idea here is that I can place points on the map where I want the river to flow and every time I make a change Unity creates a mesh based upon the position rotation and width of the control points and I'm probably getting too technical here but the script also adds UV points to each vertex based on how far away the control point is from the previous point I can then use these UV coordinates in the Shader to tell the Shader which way and how fast the river is flowing this is a computationally fast way to make the river look real without any fluid simulation here's what the water looks like with the Shader the Shader is primarily two noise textures moving at different speeds along the river I then map this noise through a color between light blue and dark blue this gives the nice effect of moving water and it's all done with math I freaking love shaders I added some particle effects to create the illusion of splashing and turbulence and Presto do-it-yourself Rivers I created the Shader for the ponds and lakes using a similar effect except I scale the noise instead of moving it and that means the colors collapse on each other the way ripples do the whole process was a lot of adding and tweaking variables in my shaders until I got something I like to look at [Music] that's going to wrap up this episode I'm happy with what I have so far but the environment is pretty lifeless without any uh life yeah I definitely need to add some trees grass and rocks maybe some flowers blowing in the wind I want this game to be beautiful and I look forward to showing you guys my progress next time thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: advancenine

Views: 460,498

Keywords: indiedev, #indiedev, indiedev documentary, making the game - an indiedev documentary, indie dev, indie devlog, indie game dev, indie gamedev, black indie dev, indie, indie developer, indie game devlog, indie game developer, indie game development, indie game, indie news, indiegame, indie games, indie game developer tips, #indiegame, indie studio, juegos indie, gamedev, game dev, indie developer documentary, indie video game documentary, dev, #gamedev, steam, steam deck

Id: WnnaI_OXeEA

Length: 7min 17sec (437 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Fluid_Ad9665]

Cool devlog! I’m a novice myself with less than a year of experience. I bought InTerra from the asset store and it’s SO GOOD at auto-painting terrain.