P1 Planning

Welcome back Players. This is one of those months where it makes a lot of sense to do an extra post.

To give a brief overview of what’s happening here, this post marks the start of a series on the blog and will lay out some plans for my dream game. I’ll introduce a list of features and transition into identifying programming goals. Hence the post title up there being Project 1 Planning, or P1 Planning for short.

Details for P1

This will be present in update posts too, but here’s the dream list of everything so far.

Name:
- I’ve settled on the name Pets-pedition.
Genre Elements:
- Action.
- Platform.
- RPG.
Modes:
- Single Player.
- Multiplayer. (Max number: 4.)
Features:
- Cute, playable pet characters. (Once again for those along the back of the den, CUTE PETS!)
- A small skill tree emphasizing more on ability alterations.
- A set of job classes for various ways to play.

Searching for Manageable Pieces

Next step from here is to identify the smaller pieces now that the big picture is out there. It’s similar to looking at a dragon. There’s a plethora of information present even at just a glance. That dragon has a Level, an HP bar, and an aura surrounding it. Then there are the scales covering the body and so on.

Hopefully the idea in that analogy comes across clearly. Now let’s put that P1 Planning title to work and break down the details to smaller chunks.

Movement

For a game that will be focused on letting Players out there run around with abilities, movement’s quite important. Other elements of the game lose some of their impact if the movement does not feel good. Basic movement includes walking, dashing, and jumping. I’d also like to include a bit of climbing and swimming as well.

Each of those can be broken down into a some program code. I’m focused on using Godot’s game engine. Godot also has a great built-in starting point for basic movement, so I can start from there. Physics and gravity are other easily adjustable movement related attributes within the game engine. However, this section would need the fine-tuning from beginning to end to make sure everything flows together correctly.

Action

The action in the game will let Players rough up some baddies and overcome some hazards. The greatest potential for building gameplay uniqueness comes from here. The general pacing depends mostly on the Player’s speed with occasional level design mix-ups.

The ability options Players will have would depend on what they decide to choose for their pet’s job class. Job classes tie in some of those well-known RPG elements and provide some unique customizable abilities. Players will always have the option to change their pet’s job class to find what suits their playstyle. While it’s the most complex thing to code, I believe most of the fun will be found here.

The question is how to create manageable stepping stones from a programming perspective? My first idea would be addressing basic actions such as attacking, guarding, and evading for each job class. After that is getting the abilities down. Abilities provide more flair and have offensive, defensive, and passive categories. The next challenge from there is going to be saving and reading combinations. Testing for bugs to make sure everything comes together as intended is going to be a lengthy process. I do look forward to putting it all together though.

Enemies

Baddies encountered in the game will have their own set of abilities and strings of attacks. Difficulty from the normal enemies alone is should be low at first. As the game progresses, there will be an increase in both volume and type variation to provide more of a challenge.

Stronger types of enemies to be encountered are called Betas and Alphas. Betas are elite type enemies that are basically mini bosses. Alphas, on the other hand, are legit bosses for given areas. The part about both of these that I’m excited to play with most is relative size from a visual point.

To be perfectly honest with all of you, thinking about how to program enemies is a mountain of a task to me that would need more research. Outside of their own attacks, they would need some internal sections of code to prepare to interact with you, Players. From the top of my head, this would include things like timers, detection radii, and attack patterns.

Assets and Sounds

It wouldn’t be a game dev discussion without a section like this. Let’s start with the broad strokes. I want Players to look at a screenshot and think that the game is cute. The art will have to be vibrant and colorful to make that happen. The sounds for the game should be relatively soft outside of some select attacks and hazards.

Where this stuff is going to come from is an excellent question. I am not much of a graphic or music artist myself and let me be the first to tell you! My art resume consists of a small amount of digital drawing and a small amount of pixel art. Pixel art is probably not the way to go here as it would require some very high effort and high resolution work. It is more feasible for me to look towards the community and Godot’s asset library for the moment.

P1 Planning Roadmap and Wrapping Up

Let’s make a to-do list for P1.

Create title screen, menus, and UI
Work on movement with physics and platforms
Build the basic actions
Establish the abilities of job classes
Save/Load selected combinations
Tackle enemy interaction mountain
Figure out what to do for art, sound, and music
Multiplayer was up in the dream details.

Well, there’s everything for now Players. There was a lot to talk about here from game idea details down to the assets. Thank you for sticking around for this lengthier post.

Please feel free to send an email to me if there’s anything left on your mind. As always, you can share tips and advice too. That way the information can be relayed out to others who may need some help. Next general post will go live in September. Stay tuned for more of the P1 post series too.