Indie Journal: Week 1

The Indie Development project is the one I have been looking forward to the most throughout the year. It is the area I have wanted to specialise in since I first heard the course having specializations in the second and third year. After attending the lecture, I was surprised that our task for the project was to make an entire game - whatever we wanted. Within Year 0, we were tasked with creating a platformer of some kind. However, for this project we have been tasked with creating whatever we like. This actually left me at a loss.

I spent the first week creating prototypes. I knew that I wanted to create a 3D game, as I most likely wouldn't be able to create enough 2D art for a game like that. I decided to just make things in UE4 and see what ideas they gave me. While I did not produce much practically, working in the engine helped me come up with ideas. I ended up with the following ideas I could pursue:

  1. A top down physics game where you could push and pull objects (to use them to attack enemies)
  2. A fighting game system similar to the Yakuza series.
  3. A bullet hell game that is set to the beat of music.
Out of those games, the one I was most interested in was the bullet hell game. However, after talking to George, I felt like this would not be the best idea to follow. The systems required to create the game are heavily dependent on audio. Since I had no experience with making use of audio data, I would likely not create everything in time for hand in. So, I decided to instead focus on the physics based game.

I soon realised something - while the core idea was fun, it was heavily involved in controlling physics objects. Doing this would likely be very difficult to get to 'feel' right, and since the feel of the game was something important to me, I decided to instead simplify the concept down to a hack and slash.

At this point, I had very little to show. I did, however, have an idea of what I was going to make.

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