Time to make a game

I’ve had a problem that many people who want to start making games face. I can’t finish a game. It’s annoying and demotivating when you feel like you can’t finish a project. You might come up with a good idea here and there, or you might begin a prototype that just eats up space in your hard drive. Either way, it ends up in the same way: Weekends and even weekdays of watching the latest episode of Game of Thrones or Vikings while you deal with your self-loathe of not being able to finish anything. Well, I’m tired of that.

I am setting out to finish one game. I mean you can’t expect to be known in the game industry without trying to put yourself out there for other people to see your games. You can’t let your fears hold you. So for inspiration I started reading about people’s experiences. I came across Tom Francis’s story about Gunpoint over at his website and got a great amount of inspiration from how he approached game development. Truly inspiring.

YoYo Games’ GameMaker Studio is the tool I’ll be using.

So I started on a prototype. So far, so good. Enjoying getting rid of my rustiness on GameMaker and time to get this game done. Here are the main things I want in this game:

A main character that people can put their personality in to

I want the main character to be flexible. I know he’s going to be a mercenary-spy type of person but that’s just his occupation. I don’t want to give him a fixed personality because personally, I prefer when games don’t give the main character a fixed personality. It works well when you’ve got very believable characters (see: Red Dead Redemption) but most of the time, I feel that unless you are passionate about the story line, it never really works out. Think of games like Bastion and Gunpoint.

Randomly generated missions and levels

Well I don’t really like the feel of a linear story but I don’t think I have the desire to have a very complex story. So, I won’t really make a story for the game. You’re a mercenary-spy guy. You accept missions from private organizations to help them. Done. “Can you assassinate the head of our main competitor?” “Sure!”. “Can you steal documents from these guys?” “Sure!”. Of course I want there to sort of be an ending so I’m thinking about making the story sort of like a tree diagram that grows itself. There’ll be several randomly generated organizations each with a random motive. Somehow motives will interlink and you’ll have to choose sides. Sounds pretty cool to me. Have any ideas of how I could go about this?

Working on the randomly generated rooms. So far it’s working well.

The main guy

Last thing on the player. The main mechanics I want is for the player to be able to hack into the computer systems and use it against the guards in the buildings to finish his missions… or not. I want the player to also be able to be a brute and kill everyone. Maybe that could add to the type of people that try hire you? What do you think about that?

Well, let’s get this project done and over with. Expect concept demos to show you what I’m working on.

Please leave a comment below!