Devlog: That-Game

Early footage of that-game. State from 2023/06/29.

You are probably aware that making a game takes time and effort. Even with modern game engines around like Unreal, Unity, Godot, CryEngine and co. it will still take some time to produce a solid game. In the past I already had my fair share of developing my own custom game engines. Nothing really fancy, but it still took some effort to make things happening on screen. Having this experience really makes you appreciate the work that is lifted by these modern game engines commonly used today.

So I am having a lot of spare time lately and I decided to finally start making that game I always wanted to make. What game you ask? Well good question I am not a 100% certain myself yet, but I am confident to figure it out over the next couple of weeks or month. I guess my primary motivation for me doing this, is that I always wanted to make a full fledged game and not just bits and pieces of it. I would consider it a major achievement developing and publishing a game. If people would enjoy playing it, this would mean the world to me. I know it is a long road to that sweet glory and success is not even guaranteed. But honestly that’s exactly what thrills me so much about this whole idea.

In late April 2023 I’ve decided to start this project. Since then I basically spent each day roughly 4-8 hours working on it. Three month in and you can see the current progress in the video linked above. I know nothing really fancy for the eye, yet. But you know me, I am more of a programmer not an artist so I save all that for later 😉 So what type of game is that-game going to be? I have decided to create a 2D top-down rogue hack & slay game in pixel-art style. The game should feature the following elements: Skills/Abilities, Items, Stats (STR/AGI/INT …), Repetitive, Leaderboard, Multi-platform. I am giving myself a maximum deadline until the end of 2023 (~8 month from the time I started). Now 8 month isn’t going to be enough to bust out that first class AAA game, but I believe it is a reasonable amount of time to make a 2D pixel-art game happening. I grew up as a kid playing these old classics like Zelda: A link to the past (best game ever) and I feel still today very drawn to these old nostalgic titles, so that’s the reason why I am going with that pixel-art style. Did I mention that I am also a huge fan of the Warcraft and Diablo series. Killing mobs for loot and experience to learn new skills was always super captivating, of course these features have to be part of that game too. Finally I would like this game to be competitive in a way where player progression is shown on a leaderboard: most mobs killed, most damage dealt, fastest run, that kind of stuff. Every player will be able to play the same levels as everyone else and after a week or so new levels will be generated and the leaderboard is reseted. Well and that’s the rough idea about game features I want to put in. To give you an even better idea how that game might look like checkout “Wizard of Legend“. I personally never played that game (yet), but this is definitely what I am talking about 🙂 

Now, if I peaked your interest stay tuned for upcoming posts about my journey making that game. There is lot’s of material I can talk about ranging from… How to implement a tile-map based level-generator using the Wave-Function Collapse algorithm.

Generate a random tilemap level using WFC.

Create enemy steering behaviours, like wander, flee, pursue, avoid.

Enemy wander and avoid steering behaviour.

Event sourcing, Unity ECS (DOTS), spawn entities, UI views and controller, debug tools, game state management, …

If you want to get access to the source code visit my Github sponsor page and become an active sponsor, this will give you access to all my private repositories, where you will find the source code for this project 🙂

So far…

Cheers,
Tobs