Getting Started

So this is the start of a new project. Kind of. I've been working on prototypes with my team all summer, but officially this is the start of a new project. It's a little exciting, but mostly just intimidating and exhausting. It's going to be really interesting working on this game, solving new problems,  and so on, but I can already tell it's also going to be a very long year.

We're working on two prototypes.

One is a customizable platform fighter. It's fast, it's deep, it's probably fun. It wears its inspirations (Super Smash Bros, Magic: The Gathering, a little bit of League of Legends and DOTA) on its sleeve, and that's just fine for the kind of game we want it to be. I'm confident we have enough unique ideas that it is a game of its own, rather than just being derivative. From a programming perspective, it's pretty simple, or at least extremely well-defined. I have a playable prototype done, it took me like two days of solid work, and that means that if we pursue this project, currently without a name, I will probably be able to spend most of my time writing tools code for our designers to add new attacks. I like that. I enjoy writing tools code, and I'm pretty good at it.

The other is a game about mole people. Players tunnel around and try to fight each other with environmental hazards. They can't hurt other moles directly, but they can drop them into pits or flood their tunnels. It's a much more interesting, but much riskier design, in the sense that it isn't really directly preceded by anything in the same way, and as such we have very few reference points to base the gameplay upon. I'm not doing the prototype for it. Hopefully when I see the prototype I'll get a better idea of what this game is actually intended to be. From a programming perspective, this tentatively looks like a nightmare. It doesn't look hard, there aren't really any specific threatening challenges in the design (walk, climb, break tiles, eat worms, gain powers, drown moles) but there are a ton of assorted systems and fiddly things that can occupy and endless amount of my time. If we pursue this project, it threatens to occupy my every waking hour for the rest of the year, while never presenting a single interesting challenge. This game is called Underminers, because if nothing else this team is very good at coming up with pages and pages of puns about moles.

Obviously, my vote right now is for the first one.