Today is the day that marks nearly a week (months, this ended up in drafts for a while!) since I posted about kickstarting a new game project. I won’t lie, it has been extremely hard to make progress, alas it has been a rather tough time at work with brain melting problems, only to finish the day and then restart all over again, this time with Unreal Engine. But it’s nice to see learning taking place, progress being made and things happening!
First of all, it’s not been a gameplay focused week at all. It’s been getting barebones UI setup, backend services configured, and fleshing out aspects of the story, along with what gameplay elements MIGHT exist. So far, this is what I’ve got.
Story
The core idea, is that it’s the year 2255, humanity has reached for the stars, and as a result has enacted colonies on certain planets. The fundamental principle is that these are private colonies ran by corporations. Various factions fighting for control of the systems. There are various paths that you might be able to go down. One path that I’m pretty focused on is an underlying story regarding a corporation allied with the Earth Government, which transported earths citizens to colonies. It turns out that when the event which sundered earth was some kind of twist, then it turns out they were actually doing it for pretty downright evil means. Think Vault Tec from Fallout. Absolutely love the idea of Vaults, but that’s a bit too “copy cat” on the nose. We can be inspired right??
Anyway, your one of these folk that have been shipped off to a colony. The idea is that you’ll have the main story you can progress, while also having a Destiny 2 PVP / Tarkov mode that you’ll be able to jump into. That’ll see you coming back to Earth/Other Colonies to scavage resources for whatever faction you’ve decided to ally with. Comes with the usual global markets all that kind of thing.
It’s not fleshed out completely yet, but am sure you can see where I’m going with this. I of course need to state that none of this is final. Might change the time period, still need to do mass amounts of research. Core development goal is to focus on the Multiplayer Shooter aspect at the moment. It’ll be a fun shooter, which stresses
Game Systems
So far, we’re utilizing PlayFab for backend services. This really keeps the complexity of work down, there’s no point at all in reinventing the wheel. They’ll handle characters, inventory, currency, server side validation and game servers. Not entirely sure on player numbers yet, but it is not going to be an MMORPG anyway, will be lobbies that kind of thing. I’m hoping we can get around 16-32 players, all depending on map sizes.
I’m aiming towards an FPS game, with RPG elements for your character. The idea is that Multiplayer massively affects single player and vice versa. This will be an online game, but I am hoping to continue the pledge of providing server code to server admins, should anyone wish to have an offline experience, or something like that. I’m not entirely sure how the backend systems can be uncoupled from that, but rest assured it’ll be on the list.
What is next?
Once I have the systems to a point where a user can Register, Login, Create a Character and Enter the World. I’ll then switch over to core gameplay. Things like Guns, running, characters, that kinda thing. I still expect to keep up the weekly updates even if not much progress has been made. The above has now all been done
All in all, things are going good.
Current Annoyances
- PlayFab does seem kinda Janky in certain places. Most guides are written for CloudScript but that’s legacy now. Azure Functions don’t seem very well documented.
- Getting basic data like a list of characters is a chore
- The UI seems completely off screen, I was hoping it would scale no matter the resolution. I must be doing something wrong.
- The Unreal Basic UI is god awful looking. If I can’t find a Tailwinds for Unreal I’ll be depressed
- I’m not entirely sure what to do regarding keeping the project safe. If I lost this progress I’d be massively bummed. So not sure what to do. Git broke my last project, not entirely sure I want to do that again.