For a while now I’ve been working on a video game. It’s been on the back of my mind to blog about, but I haven’t found the time. Until now!
The game I’m currently working on, Delugional, was born partly out of failure. Before it, I spent about a year working on another, very different game. I learnt a lot from that project, which I’ll write about another time, like how to program in C# and how to use the Unity game engine. But most of all I learned how not to bring a game to completion. I had a lot of fun trying different ideas, but at some point it was apparent that my vision was vastly overambitious and I was never going to complete it in any feasible timescale.
So I shelved that idea with tender regret. But I still wanted to make a game, to do something tangible with the knowhow I’d accumulated. What I needed was a much more focussed type of game.
My sister-in-law had just visited us for a few months, bringing her iPad, and had introduced me to mobile gaming; hitherto I’d mainly been a PC guy. That had reacquainted me with a genre of game I’ve loved since I was a little kid: the puzzle game. I grew up hooked on games like Minesweeper, Pipe Dreams, and The Incredible Machine: games that stimulated the grey matter, without being overwhelming for a 10 year-old with lousy hand-eye coordination.
A puzzle game was perfect for a lone programmer with a tight schedule. Simple on the technical side, and feasible to prototype with my nonexistent artistic skills. All I needed was an idea. Easy, right?
In the next post, I’ll talk about the idea-culling process, and how I came up with a workable prototype for a puzzle game.
