A bit about the early part of this journey.

Almost missed the mark for posting a blog post this month, but here it is.

As I move forward with this project, my next focus will be on the mechanics for the game and the style of the game I am currently aiming towards, while also trying to settle on which engine to use. I have already decided that I want to make this as a 3D platformer variant, and I have been looking for and collecting a list of games to play through to try and see which elements work and don’t work for the specific games. I recently completed ‘Time on Frog island’ and ‘A hat in time’, and since I backed Psychonauts 2 I have that ready to go and just need to find the time to delve deeper into it. Other stuff on the list includes games like FE, Figment, Super Mario Odyssey and a bunch more. I am of the belief that the more I experience, both games and stuff not related to games, the richer an experience I will be able to create in the end.

I have narrowed down my choice of game engine to either Unity or Unreal. This is due to the fact that a lot of the games that I am going through have been created in one of them, and for me the ability to use a visual scripting approach feels more natural than writing code and each of them has their own solution in this area.

With regards to the mechanics, there are some that are pretty settled within this style of game, so one of the challenges becomes how to both use some of the established control ‘tropes’ while also adding one or more things on top of that, to make this have its own place in comparison.