One Year of Learning Gamedev

if I've learned anything over the last year it's that Game Dev is really hard planning coding art animation sound design bug fixing game testing you end up requiring a wide variety of skills and end up learning a little bit of everything while sucking at all of them it's been a little over a year since I started working on my first game and I wanted to just take a look back and reflect on how this last year went including what I learned and the progress that I made while I did start working on my game a year ago I actually started learning Gam development a few months earlier so we need to go back a little farther to September of 2022 before this I had no Game Dev or programming experience outside of some very basic front-end web development so I started off by taking a course on udemy called complete C unity game developer 2D wow what a concise name overall I thought the course was pretty good it mainly focused on teaching the basics of programming with C while using the unity engine I didn't actually finish the course however as the course has a sharp increase in complexity around 75% of the way through so I decided to jump ship at that point after that I started uploading videos to this channel in October of that year I was originally planning on doing a bullet hell game where you played as some sort of hollow nighl looking cat thing I originally was interested in pixel art but I quickly realized that pixel art is easy to get into but very difficult to master so in the next video I switched away from Pixel artart and and started using k for the 2D art that video ended up getting quite a lot of views for a new channel I still don't fully understand why that happened because the video is objectively bad but riding that high I released a couple more devlogs but then I stopped working on the game for about 4 months as I was becoming increasingly more aware that the skills I gained from doing half of one udemy course was not enough so any normal person would do the obvious thing here and just finish the other half of that course well I didn't want to do that so for whatever reason I instead started another udemy course but this one was an intermediate course focusing mainly on RPG mechanics as I worked through the RPG course slowly my brain started expanding and eventually I didn't finish that course either I think I just started getting a little bored of going through classes over and over again listen okay I probably should have finished both courses but at least Le for me I feel like I learn better when I can just experiment and break things on my own anyways at this point I wanted to start working on a project again but this time it wasn't going to be a bullet hell game I was interested in making a turn-based tactics game although when I started working on this all I knew is that I wanted to make a rogue like that used chess behaviors similar to something like Pond barians but the game has transformed quite a bit since then over the course of the last year I've gone through multiple evolutions of the enemy behaviors the first iteration was very similar to the classic chess pieces where each enemy would have a behavior similar to something like a rook or a bishop where they would need to move and attack within their assigned pattern in this build of the game the enemies would have a maximum of three actions in which they could move in a single Direction each turn I ended up eventually pivoting away from this as forcing the enemies to move within these restrictions felt a little too limited from there I started working on the player controller and had some interesting ideas for that I had or Al thought up a card style design where every turn the player would draw cards that would contain a movement pattern and an action total I think around this time I was playing a lot of slay the Spire which was influencing my design choices anyways while I still do think this was a cool idea it really slowed down the pace of the game which I didn't like so I ended up cutting it so leaving behind gameplay mechanics I decided it was time to start tackling the art for the game and if it feels like the development for this is jumping all over the place it definitely was back then I was developing features and then jumping to other features while deleting other stuff it was all over the place I feel like I've gotten a bit better about this more recently but hey that's Game Dev baby anyways I needed to get rid of all this placeholder art so I started working on a dungeon tile set I remember that I was having a lot of trouble getting the Fidelity and style of the tiles to fit right in this devlog I also started working on the Pikeman which was going to act as a rook type enemy meaning It could only move orthagonal even though it's almost a year later this is still one of my favorite Sprites that I've made it was in this devlog that I also removed the movement restrictions from the enemies meaning that in this Example The Rook pattern only restricted the enemy's attack tiles this made the enemies far more flexible while navigating the room now that the Pikeman had been added I thought I might as well add another enemy so I started working on the skirmisher then I decided that this rat looked kind of ugly and gross so I threw him in the trash after that I started working on the off canvas UI that I mentioned earlier this version focused on listing out all the stats for the player as well as whichever enemy unit was being hovered over and this is just one of the many versions of the UI that I've done I think I've honestly at this point redone the UI a dozen times and I will probably replace it a dozen more before the game is actually finished I know a lot of game devs really hate doing UI work but personally I kind of like working on it maybe I'm just a little freak and of course it wouldn't be a dungeon crawling Rog like if there wasn't some sort of randomized item system so I started working on the basics of the item system which include maybe like five items at this point although they were just simple stat increases I designed this chest Sprite that would open to reveal some item cards for the player to choose from along with the Enemy behaviors this is one of the systems that I've never really stopped tinkering with up until this point the player was stuck inside of this singular room so I worked on a script that would generate and move the player to the next room once once the door had been unlocked the next devlog mainly focused on status effects this includes burning stunning freezing poison and bleed however the way I had implemented burning bleed and poison felt way too similar to each other so I ended up removing bleed and poison and ended up just keeping burning after that since units could Now Catch Fire I wanted to add some additional hazards into the game meaning that I would need to create some new room environments this included a volcanic and Forest room that I needed to make a full set of Sprites for the volcanic room would get a lava Hazard tile and the water tile would move to the forest room with the dungeon room gaining a spike tile instead I also wanted to add a little bit of life to the room environments so I added an optional variable to the floor tiles that would contain a plant Sprite with a wind Shader attached to it then I switched the obstacle spawning to pull from an array meaning that the different room types could contain different obstacles including this new skull pile that I made I wanted some strategic interactions with the hazard tiles so I also made it so that if a burning unit walks onto a lava tile the burning status will be removed and if a frozen unit walks onto a lava tile the freezing status will be removed so now that we had some different environments to explore I decided to switch my focus back to the enemies for now this was mainly to do with the fact that the game needed some sort of scaling system to make the enemies more difficult the farther the player progressed at this point in development this mainly included a damage and health multiplier and an increase to Total actions this devlog also saw the first iteration of enemy abilities the plan at this point was to have each enemy have its own ability that it would use during combat the rat enemy would heal itself the Pikeman would charge orthagonal until hitting either a Target or the wall the skirmisher would enter an enraged State doubling its actions and the crow would fire a projectile overall I was pretty happy with the ability system I thought it was interesting how the randomized combin ations of enemies being spawned in made for some really unique ability synergies With the Enemy ability system implemented in the next devlog I decided to add in five more enemies effectively doubling the total number of enemies in the game I thought that this was a good idea at the time but now I don't really think so just because it multiplied the amount of work that I needed to do for each enemy anyways I don't really want to get into at this video up until this point the player could only Attack One enemy at a time and I wanted to add in a mechanic that would allow the player to deal some AOE damage so I gave the player bombs which can be placed on empty tiles and explode between the player and enemy's turn the bomb explodes on all adjacent tiles dealing damage to units and destroying obstacles and yes this does include chests bombs are also a limited resource the player will start with only three bombs at the beginning of the game personally I really enjoy the bomb mechanic I think it added another dimension to thinking about how you're going to tackle a group of difficult enemies the next video didn't really have that much new content to show as it focused on enhancing the ability system code to be compatible with the player as well I'm still not sure how I feel about how the abilities are found in this build of the game but it definitely worked at least I also added in a whole bunch of new items for the player to use in this devlog I think at the end of this video the item pool was sitting around 25ish items along with the eight abilities that could be found the UI also got updated in this devlog for the second last time before the demo was released this update mainly focused on displaying stat values that were upgraded by items that were already equipped now it was time to prep for Steam nextfest and to do that the game needed some very important screens the main menu options menu and death screen since the game is relatively Bare Bones at this point the options menu was pretty simple only really containing settings for volume and screen resolution as well as some other options for restarting the run and quitting the game it was at this point where I needed to export the build of the game from Unity this was something that I thought was going to take less than a minute to do but ended up being a giant headache as I was running into compiler errors that needed to be fixed after the build was successful I sent the game off to a couple friends that wanted to play test it I'm not going to go over the feedback changes that I did as a result of the play testing as it's nothing really important but if you're interested in that you can check out that video at this point it was right before nextfest and I made a last minute decision to add a boss to the end of the demo half because I felt like the demo ending was too boring and half because I wanted to challenge myself to start and finish the boss in one week to do this I needed to create a completely separate enemy type as the boss's behaviors were functionally very different from anything else I had worked on at that point I had decided on the boss being a giant slime mainly so that I wouldn't waste too much time creating and animating the Sprite this way I can focus on the actual development and implementation I think overall the boss turned out to be the highlight of the demo build I limited the boss to only having three abilities that I could use two of them synergizing together those being the Slime spawning ability and the jump attack that the boss would do which would trigger any spawn slime piles to explode dealing AOE damage to any nearby units which of course brings us to now or at least the end of January which was when the last devlog came out you're probably thinking okay but what new development work have you done well if you want to see that you should probably subscribe to the channel I was originally going to cover all the recent content that I've added to the game since it's been almost 2 and 1/2 months since I've actually shown anything new but I've decided that it requires its own video which will probably end up being three times longer than any other devlog that I've done so far just because of the amount of changes that I've made participating in Steam nextfest really opened my eyes to the fact that I needed to make some significant changes to what pumber tower is and I I've been hard at work on those ever since the festival ended I've pretty much reworked or completely Rewritten every major system in my game so if you're interested in that at all leave a like on the video subscribe to the channel and of course wish list pumber tower on Steam

Channel: Gamedev Greedable

Views: 46,220

Keywords: Gamedev, Devlog, game, developer, roguelike, rougelite, indie game, unity, c#, binding of issac, cult of the lamb, enter the gungeon, nuclear throne, darkestdungeon2, northernlion, darkest dungeon, Steam, Hades, Hollow Knight, silksong, celeste, undertale, pawnbarian, Game Development, Indie Game Dev, Gamedev Update, Game Design, Programming, Roguelike Game Development, Procedural Generation, Roguelike Machanics, Turn-based Strategy, Dungeon Crawler Development, Penumbra Tower, 2D Top Down

Id: tyGgRdNOTms

Length: 12min 18sec (738 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 30 2024