Today marks the first day of me taking this game dev hobby a bit more seriously. I decided to do that via daily blog posts. 

The main point of these is to at least have something to dedicate myself to. It's a simple challenge, but one that I failed many times for different personal projects. In a way, I see this as another chance to apply myself more, for I didn't the best job at that in my college years long ago. With the day job I have, I feel as though I'm maturing more with handling tasks that are mundane, of which there are a lot when it comes to game development. 

My biggest goal in game development is to meet people. Post-college life is so lonely, and I'm not doing much else outside of my job. There are a few other things I do that expose me to other people, but they all get pretty stale. I also hope to have something to show other people when I want to collaborate with them. That's definitely a more short term and immediate goal with this project.

I feel as though now would be the time to layout the timing of my first project, but honestly, I have no clue how long it will take, as I am a beginner, and there are things that I don't know that I don't know. So for this first project, I will skip that. 

I already have a title for the project, "Ping Bot Blast!" (Exclamation mark included). It's a ping-ping game, essentially. But, instead of regular, rectangular paddles, the paddles will be robots that can create a paddle-barrier in front of them. And the ball is a bomb that explodes if it makes it past one of the paddles, destroying the bot and knocking out people. I say knock out because I want to create PG games for now.

The story is this, in a world of demolition bot teams that shoot bomb balls and can summon backup barriers, the pong bots have gone rouge for some reason, and it's up to Albert Acorn and his companion robot, Ping Bot (who the game is named after) to save the day. 

Albert Acorn is an employee and is loosely named after Allen Alcorn, a developer of the original ping pong computer game. In game, Albert will have abilities other than reflecting the ball via a barrier, such as shooting out another ball or maybe firing a laser that knocks back the ball. 

I've already gotten a very barebones prototype working, as well as some art for some of the characters, but I figured before I go any further, I should really work more on the Game Design Document, so that's going to be the thing I do for the next few days. 

There are some worries I have with the project that might make it take even longer than I expected. 

Art

For one, I am not an artist, but I can see that learning how to create assets will really be good for me in the long run. So I began practicing how to draw very basic characters that I will be using. In fact, attached to this post is some art of Albert, Ping Bot, and a pong bot. Again, I'm not an artist. For my imaginary reader, don't laugh too hard, please. I could have looked towards outsourcing, but none of the free assets matches the art style I want and I don't want to pay for anything that'll be used in a project that I for sure will not get any revenue in.

I chose the flat art style that's a tiny bit akin (but nowhere near as good as) Kurzgesagt's art style on YouTube. It seems simple enough to work with and I'm bored to tears of looking at pixel art. Instead of having to learn form, gesture, and other more advanced art concepts, I can just focus on shapes and color. I like that, so that's the art style I'm going with for now. Maybe in the very distant future, I will aim for something more complex.

Level Design

I've already accepted that this will be a short game, despite the months it may take to create it. There's only so much I can do with a ping pong game. So I will have to come up with a way to mix things up and up the difficulty as the player progresses through the levels. There will be different ping bots that will have their own ways of defeating them and Albert will steadily gain more abilities. But, I will have to be careful about feature creep. Before embarking on making a cool new enemy or new tool Albert can use, I have to be aware of how long it may take to create it.

Sound

This is for sure something I will have to outsource with free sound and music samples. Unlike with art, I have absolutely zero interest in learning sound design and learning how to produce sound. I also don't have a specific assortment of sounds that I want, so I'll be much more open to using free sounds, wherever I can find them.

For the art I attached,  these are of Albert Acorn and the Ping Bot (Bluish, cool one) and Pong Bot (Yellow, industrial-looking one). I'm actually really proud of them. I recently hired an art tutor, who taught me 2 very important things:

Reference - Using an image and basing the character off of that. I based the Ping bot off of a robot image I found off line. I traced that said robot image and then started altering things from there. I made a copy of the ping bot to create the pong bot, who is the yellow robot.

Refinement - Redrawing your character and playing around with different shapes, positions, proportions, and more. There are more versions of these characters I drew using Inkscape, but I moved them off of the canvas, so they're not visible. 

I actually used an old tablet to draw. I felt very repulsed by the idea of using a table instead of pen and paper, but I fought through that bias since the ability to directly trace things on a computer screen would really accelerate my learning for drawing stuff. I must say, I'm glad I did and now I really like the tablet. For any new artists who are still a bit on the fence, I strongly recommend you get one. Just try it. 

That does it for day 1 of this game-making endeavor. I'm pretty sure this post will only be visible on my page or something. It would be a tad bit embarrassing if this dairy-like post appears on the front page ;-;. 

Images I referenced: