the project

motivations

This summer, I want to expand my portfolio and make game, one that I can learn from and show. I’m not going to concern myself with making a finished game of any sort, this project will be more of a demo. Maybe this will be a smaller project behind a large long term project, I want it to be something that I’ll keep coming up with new ideas for and will keep coming back to expand upon. Its a little naive to expect that one of my first projects will be a project that will last me a long time, but at the moment I have a lot of ideas for it. Maybe it won’t work out and maybe I’ll never come back to it, but I’ll learn a lot.

This project may have a steep learning curve. I’ve created one game before and that was using Python and PyGame, this time I’ll need to learn a game development engine.

the idea

My idea is a that there is a continually dying fire that you have to keep alive. The fire will get smaller and smaller and eventually die out unless you provide it with fuel. Sticks will be strewn around that you can add to the fire to keep it alive. This doesn’t sound very fun, but there’s always room for a progression system with upgrades and more types of fuel. Maybe if you pile on enough sticks on the fire you’ll be able to chop a tree down and use logs which provide more fuel. Maybe at the start you can only hold so many sticks but you craft bags and carts that help you get and move fuel around easier and quicker. Maybe the better fuel sources are further out from your fire so you have to move further and further to find fuel and make sure the fire is large enough to give you time. Maybe eventually you’ll be able to automate parts of it. Maybe it’s also a survival game where you have to eat and drink. Maybe there’s rain and wet logs don’t work as well so you have to build a shelter around your log pile. Maybe different wood types have different effects on the fire. There are many places and directions this idea can be taken.

The game will be 2D and pixel art. It will be 2D because I have no experience in creating anything 3D at all. It will be pixel art as it’s the easy choice and I have some experience in it from my last game.

engine

From what I know there are two main choices for this project: Unity and Godot. Unity is an industry standard, has more tutorials, has better 3D support, and uses C#. Godot is open-source, more lightweight, easier to learn, and primarily uses a Python-esque language. Unity has a lot of very good qualities, but I am going to start with Godot. It’s mainly Godot’s lightweightness and open-sourceness that attract me, but it does seem better suited to projects like this one where I want to make something small, light, and quickly. I’ll end up using Unity in the future but learning Godot now might offer an easier starting point.

next

I’ll first have to download Godot and start learning how to use it. If all goes well I’ll keep this page updated with my progress, but we’ll see how frequent that ends up being as I’m quite busy at the moment.