This my Recognition report :
Since I released the first part of my game Code Name Agent Shadow, I will give you some advice on what I learned from this experience, we will try to find the best plan to make a game.
Before all, I just want to give you some advices that I would have liked to hear before I started my games , it’s simply a feedback , I don’t have the pretention to say that I will learn you something amazing, I just hope that it will help you.
1.Make an accessible objective : First of all you just have to realize that you won’t make a triple A game, you cannot do a “cyber punk 2077” or a “GTA 5” for the simple reason that you are not a hundred people behind the project and you don’t have enough money for this. Be care I’m not saying to aim low , but I try to say that depending on your skills and on your abilities try to do something that is realizable in the portion of time that you give to yourself , this is particularly the case for the visual part , because technically the code part is more accessible in condition to be very organize ,for the visual you have to invest more time , but it’s not really a problem, because there are too many games success with a very simple and basic visual , and of course I will give the famous example “Minecraft” , the concept is simple: “a cube” end of concept , and I will try to explain you why it succeeds, by the way it takes us to the second point.
2.Give a personality to your game : Okay your are not able to make a visual of a triple A , but you can give a personality to your game, and believe me there are a lot of games made by big companies failed to do that , so how give personality ? What did you mean by that? Today the look we give to game development is not the same as past years , today game development is more related to art , before it was more like technical prowess , so today we have to think like an “artist”, we have to make the public feel emotions , give them an idea , a thought , and to do that we have to respect a general idea in all the process of development, it is a guideline that we have to respect in order to give a consistency for all elements of the game, it creates an environment and an atmosphere in the brain of the players that make them associated automatically this idea to your game, it could be anything: a feeling , an emotion , a color , a concept , you are free and that makes you also enjoying the process of development and be always aware of what you have to do.
3.Target public and device : Before start coding anything , even choosing a game engine you have to decide which kind of players do you want them to play your game, everyone have their preferences , some people like platform games (many) , others prefer puzzle games , and the choice is varied. You have to target an age, children, teenagers, or major public, if it is young people you have to find what is popular at that time. then you can choose the device, it will condition your resolution and your assets resolution in same time, it could oblige you to make your assets in different resolutions, it will condition the controllers that you will code for, it could be on screen controllers or a pad or keyboard or maybe all of them, you must have answers to these questions before start coding, because if you are advanced in your game it is pretty hard to go back on the project.
4.Make deadline : The goal from this point is to give to yourself some organization , I don’t mean by that to choke yourself , you have to take the advantage of being indie , working in pleasant atmosphere is the most important to be inspired , you have to be honest with yourself about the time that you need to realize a task , give to yourself deadline but reasonable deadline.
5.Be strict with your work : This something that we can say to everything in life , in game development I mean making exactly what you have in mind, when you are indie you don’t have problem of communication that we can find in big team, you don’t need to explain what you want to do, so take advantage from this, and give the exact shape of your idea , your good ideas never look so good to others if they are poorly executed.
6.Enjoy I know this is so cliché , but the players will feel your state of mind while developing your game , if it becomes too complex to implement something don’t hesitate to find another way to do the same thing , and even if your work doesn’t give result you just took good. time.