Alright, it’s getting high time I said something about my latest and current attempt to make a real game that takes more than 48 hours to make and I could maybe even sell and stuff. So having closed out my first “milestone” leaving me with a functioning prototype, I’ll take this chance to summarise what it is and where it came from.
As 2010 drew to a close Ludum Dare 19 happened bringing into existence lots of little games along the rather vague theme of “Discovery”. This was the second event I entered. I made a game called Prophecy that I will freely admit was nigh-on unplayable due to a pretty awful key-driven, list-heavy interface. Yet the core idea felt sound: you “discover” the latent talents in a group of young, unskilled students before sending them out to battle great evils. One fellow entrant actually dug into my code to find how to win it (it was comically difficult to win unless you know what exactly to do).
So it was a bit of a failure, but it was the best kind of failure. It had obvious issues but yet a certain charm and promise still found a way to shine through. Fast-forward to this year and I sit down and think about how I would do it with hindsight and more time. This is what I’m referring to here as Project Prophecy.
I like this idea as a mobile game. I’m quite a fan of Kairosoft’s mobile sim games (there are some parallels here with Dungeon Village in particular, perhaps) and think they really work on that platform: although I see Prophecy as something markedly more considered and complex, the idea of putting in short bursts of play appeals. I’m developing this with my new favourite thing Unity, which will allow me to dump it onto Android and iOS with relatively little hassle. Hurray! I’m testing it on my Galaxy S2 as I go, and so far so good!
Naturally I still have a lot of work to do on this, presently it is really only a prototype for a more fully-featured game; but things are going in the right direction. I do have a day job so I’m making no promises on dates but the scope of this game is deliberately small so I might even finish it before we have hovercars. Here’s hoping “milestone 2” will come to me without much resistance!
I will attempt to update this blog with more information and thoughts as the project progresses, otherwise I continue to mutter about this and anything else that occurs to me over on Twitter.