Over the next month or three I'm going to be pretty busy wrapping up my studies, so I'm probably not going to have much time or energy to spend on game development. But I'd prefer to get little snippets of stuff done here and there, if I can get my act together and spend my break time doing something constructive instead of idly browsing the Lounge.
In that vein I did a little bit of high-level planning (while also winding down after a tiring week of debugging LaTeX documents by simultaneously watching some DVDs.). I went through all the game ideas I've had in the last few years that I still think are worthy and organised them on a chart.
Click the image (or here) for the full size version.. Admittedly the diagram is a total enigma for anyone other than myself, so you might be better off sticking with the half-sized image above. It sure looks pretty [wink].
A brief explanation for the curious: each box represents one of my game ideas. The title is the project name, which I allocate once I feel an idea has enough legs for it to be worth remembering (I also give it a manilla folder to store stuff in at this point, which is how I can remember the names.). The text under the title is just a bunch of info to help me organise the projects and remember the mental picture I have for each idea.
The height of the box in the diagram is my rough gauge of how much time it would take to implement. These are split into four tiers, roughly indicating various quanta of development time:
- Tier I is for simple demo games that I feel I could develop at my current skill level in one work week or less. These games are primarily for developing skills to lead to later tiers.
- Tier II is for games that I think I could develop up to an alpha stage at my skill level in one work month. This tier is probably the most nebulous; by stripping these down into prototypes I could move these back into Tier I, or by fleshing them out and ramping up the polish I could move them into Tier III. These ideas could thus be used either as prototypes or with a bit more effort commercial quality indie games.
- Tier III is for games I think would take me three to six months. All of these involve a fair amount of content, although not more than what I think an indie studio could handle. Some of these also involve some algorithm ideas that while I think are plausible may need testing in prototypes before this project could go ahead. If I made any of these games, I would be thinking of selling them.
- Tier IV are the very ambitious games. These are ones that I have a hard time gauging the development time, but they'd all need at least half a year, most likely more. All of them involve significant content and ideas I'd need to test before green lighting them. And the lower in this section I've put the box the more true this is. I wouldn't be attempting one of these without a better understanding of my own abilities, and an extra team member or two wouldn't go amiss either.
I've tried to organise the boxes horizontally by content matter, which is why there are connections between the boxes and those red dotted lines with genres printed on them. The connectors show what would be a potentially sensible development path if I wished to stay roughly on the same theme.
Project Ivan, the box at the very bottom, is the theoretical game that I'd really wish to make some day; an action RPG game with an interactive story-line that changes in response the the player's actions. It's by far the most ambitious game on the list, enough to warrant a Tier V to dedicate just to it.
As an aside, this diagram illustrates quite well why I don't think game ideas have any intrinsic value, and why you can't convince me to take you seriously on the forums if you are looking for developers while you only provide the "idea". Even though I'm just one hobbyist at the moment working on this in my spare time, I've gathered up enough game ideas that I want to work on to last me at least ten years, and it's not as if I'm special in this regard. Thus you need to offer something more than just an idea, as it's not as if we're starved for them [wink].
Now the question I'm pondering while writing this post is what the best way to approach moving down this graph of game ideas will be? I'm quite keen on developing any of these ideas - they're all quite good in their own way. But I doubt I'll be able to make the majority of these games. There's just too many on the list, and I'm bound to be adding to this as new ideas pop into my head as I go. So it's a question of which I feel are best to make.
Furthermore I'll be starting with a few games in Tier I, as I need the practice. But eventually I want to move into being a professional indie, marketing and selling games, so I'll need to move deeper down.
Thus is it more prudent to stick with one wing, say for example the space shooters on the left hand side, and do as much as I think is needed to support moving deeper down that wing. Or should I do a whole range of earlier titles to experiment with different genres, and see which works best? (Semi-rhetorical question: I'm aware this is a personal choice, but I'd welcome any opinions none-the-less)
My gut feeling at the moment is that a good starting point for right now is to hack around with Project Zexus, the space shooter in the top left corner, as it's a good warm-up, involves Flash (which I really need to learn), doesn't have any polish requirements and it's the sort of project I can pick up and put down in breaks as I work on my studies. Then I'll see which direction is best to go in after that. I'm just not sure whether a whole path of space shooter games is what's best, so although there's a rather clear development path down that left side of the diagram I'm not sure if it's not better to move to some of the more tactical games in the middle. We'll see.
You should obviously start with Crystal, as it has magic carpets in. Anything with a magic carpet takes priority.