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I'm making a video game! - and I could use your input/comments

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cybersmurf:
I went over the first few posts, but didn't read them all [yeah, at this point it's a TL;DR for newcomers to this thread].
This kinda feels like Hunger Games to an extent, but totally not. It appears to me like a HUGE piece of work to get even the background for the game done.

Since Tolkien and LotR came up: When Tolkien wrote LotR, he already had Middle Earth and its lore done. He could draw the story from there.
So I believe you want to do something similar: make the world work first. Draw a few short stories from there, and then decide which you could throw at the character to live through. That's hard enough per se.

After having at least sketched out a few paths to go, take a look how you can make your game framework integrate these storylines, or adapt the mechanics to your story. And don't be afraid to drop mechanics to tell the story, since I feel you want the game to tell a story, not have some generic stuff fit just another RPG.

That's what I figured might help you find your way through the Death Marshes that is your first game.

LTK:
I dunno how applicable that is given that Tolkien didn't make a game.  :wink:

Personally, among my favourite games, the ones that have a fully fleshed-out world that the story draws from are a small minority. Most of those games with a strong narrative are more occupied with creating the ambience and sensation of the world around them, rather than trying to determine its smallest details. Supergiant Games are especially good at this.

oddtail:
@cybersmurf: thanks for the comment!

Yes, it's entirely fair that the posts are TL;DR by now. And how. I'll make future questions/comments more concise if I can help it.

The thing is, game mechanics are my main point of interest. I do want to tell a story, but I want the story to be told through the mechanics, not - for the lack of a better word - in spite of them.

Creating a world and setting a game in it can absolutely work and game designers go that route all the time, it's just not necessarily the ideal approach in my case. If ideas for the kind of story dynamics (which include game mechanics) that I'm going for clashed with specifics of the game world, I'd throw out the elements of the world that don't work, and probably not the rules. Heck, I've done that multiple times. Neither the game world nor the main narrative even look anything like my first drafts. The mechanics have evolved as I kept designing and test running elements of them, but their core ideas have remained largely the same.

Of course, the story, world and mechanics ideas feed into each other and none are unimportant, but emergent stories and a game-like mechanic are a priority for me.

I did put extra emphasis on world-building in the forum posts, which may have given a different impression. But that's mostly because world-building is still in a state of flux, while game mechanics is something I've been hammering out for literally years. And I figured explaining the mechanical systems of a game I'm working on, in a vacuum, would not be that interesting.

(and also, the mechanics are fleshed out enough that I don't need as much input and help on them as I might on the story or the world)

oddtail:
That being said, there are absolutely story elements that are necessary. Mostly because they reinforce, and are reinforced by, certain game elements.

The "non-negotiable" elements include:

- the story has to be about a single mother and be primarily about saving not yourself, but your children;
- it has to be about safety and survival above gaining wealth and power for their own sake;
- anything done by the character is in service to her children and that's the main source of both mechanical and story tension;
- the story needs to be set in a setting with no strong outside authority.

Other elements are optional and have changed. Even elements now central to my concept were not a necessity. Notably, the whole "talking animals" part is a major case of author appeal, what with me being furry and all. But the core concept of the story could in theory do without that. In fact, the story was originally about some destitute, human noblewoman. Adding the anthro animal angle was a good decision, but I incorporated it because it sounded neat and meshed with some mechanical ideas, not because I necessarily wanted to tell such a story from the get-go.

oddtail:
Heh. Almost one year since the last post.

Today I finally made the leap. I asked four close friends (for now) to give me feedback on (very early) prototyping of my game. On paper, I have more than enough - the story, the characters, the game mechanics, even large parts of the interface are mapped out. I have quite a bit of actual technical parts of the game figured out as well, including a lot of code - but not much of it translates to much visible on the user end, yet.

I can't conceivably go any further without prototyping, now. And I've learnt enough about programming and about Unity specifically that I feel I'm equipped to go forward, now.

Plus, I'm really bad with overplanning and not enough "doing" (gee, can you tell?). So I decided that, barring any accidents, once a week I will share ANY progress in the actual game with my friends. No matter if it's a huge new chapter or one extra line of code. That will help me stay focused. "I want to do as much as possible this week" is a healthier approach, I feel, than my previous one, because it's easy to get overwhelmed when I think big, and end up not doing *anything* at all for weeks due to how overwhelmed I am.

I hope to have something that warrants actual testing (an early playable game... thing. By no means an actual finished game) in about half a year. That seems like a realistic timeframe. If it takes longer, it takes longer, of course.

Wish me luck!

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