Welcome back Players for another post on the blog. This is going to be a lighter one as life has had other and rather stressful plans for the month of November. I’d like to share a little bit of a plan for an up and coming project. It won’t be about the magnum opus nicknamed P1, but something that I hope will do a lot of skill building going into the next year. Anyway, here’s my … wait for it … Pixel Pursuit: The Year End Quest.
Photo by Tyler Callahan on Unsplash
Quest Objective
I know that it’s been introduced up in the title, but I haven’t gone into what exactly the title means yet. This is going to be the start of the development on my active project. You’ll be able to find a new page in the Projects list soon that will also highlight details. The name of the second project (P2) will be Project Arcade. The purpose of it is twofold. One is to have an ongoing space to practice concepts on a surface level. The second is to have something here that can be updated easily with my limited pool of assets in the art and music department.
Details for P2
- Name: Project Arcade
- Genre Elements:
- Retro-styled variety
- Modes:
- All Single Player
- Features:
- Classic re-creations
- An option to try out different experimental twists
Items to Gather
The cool thing about this project, outside of being updatable, is that there’s room for a variety of assets for the variety of themes. This offers a lot of freedom in the art and music department as ideas pool together. The flexibility is great, but it also comes with the responsibility of keeping an overall umbrella consistency. This just means that the art and music should pair with each other. While there’s nothing wrong with heavy metal music playing in the background during a gardening session, it’s not a common expectation when there’s nothing to justify it.
I have some things in my inventory already courtesy of past tutorials and browsing Godot’s asset library. There’s always the option of making a few things on my own as well. Honestly I am not likely to go all in on the build-your-own-assets route with this one because well…. I’m only a newbie in those fields. However, I am planning on doing a couple art things for even more experience. Everyone has to get their practice in somewhere.
Ambitions
Zooming in a bit on that Features list, here’s the general gist of what I’d like to go for within Project Arcade. I’d like to start with picking 3 classic retro games for inspiration. Now by retro I’m looking towards the start of gaming history around the NES and Atari Arcade eras. That’s a time period where games were really quite simple conceptually as the industry took their own baby steps. I was thinking of playing around with the rules for Breakout, Galaga , and Pac-Man.
The there are 2 reasons those games in particular were picked to play around with. One reason is that I’m familiar with them. Showing my age a bit, but those were some fun experiences to share with my family even though I started gaming in towards the end of the SNES era. The other is that I thought it might be fun to play around with the rules of them. Just imagine how the game could change if we altered roles or introduced new elements!
Conclusion
Photo by Joey kwok on Unsplash
Since I have to keep the post short, I’ll start wrapping things up. I hope everyone’s excited to see how Project Arcade comes together. To recap, I will play around with the games Breakout, Galaga, and Pac-Man first. These games won’t be as intensive to put together aesthetically so that I can focus more on coding fundamentals.
Really I’m just excited because this is something that I want to have here. It’ll be nice to finally have something to show and also prove to myself that I’m getting somewhere. Life is not an easy game. There are no built in tutorials or official guidebooks to get to where we want to be, so we have to figure it out as we go.
There’s a lot to do with work here, offline, and the holidays. As always feel free to reach out to me if you’d like. Come by again for new updates. I’ll be playing around with some things within the site as well so things will hopefully look better. Anyway I hope you have a great end of the year, Players. Happy Holidays!