So far I have done absolutely 0 programming on Game 1, and that is ok. This will definitely need to increase but it is impossible to actually start programming a game until it has been designed.
There is a design and I decided to start by working on the paper prototype.
Given the text adventure style of the game, it is actually fairly easy to do a paper prototype since it is fairly similar to a “choose your own adventure” book. Play testing will be interesting to figure out since I plan on having some resources like ammunition for a weapon be part of the decision making process.
As I was making the notecards, I thought of a neat little idea I could use in the story where instead of just reading text, the player can sometimes be faced with some sort of interface with button and switches and levers that utilizes the phones natural tap and swipe interaction to make the game more fun and interesting.
I used a notebook to draw a little flowchart that includes the major decision points and then develop out the interactions that occur at these decision points and what the story will be like on 3×5 notecards since they are similar in size to a phone screen (which is the target platform). The goal is to get to a minimal story and start building on it.
I have been doing a little tangential programming, working through a tutorial on AngularJS and MeteorJS which is the current target technology for creating the game. If it looks like this will be too unwieldy then I may go back to vanilla MeteorJS. This is sort of an excuse to teach myself Angular to see what all the fuss is about.
We are coming up on the end of the first month of 2016 already so if you haven’t already started …
Go make games.