Dev Blog #1 - Amtharus

Originally posted 11/19/23 on my game dev website

I am now 10 weeks into my game design education at Futuregames and have hit the ground sprinting! Prior to September, I’d concepted only two games (mostly focusing on the world, backstory, characters, and branching narrative with very little thought to gameplay implementation) as I lacked the technical skills to actually create them. As of today, I’ve worked on a card game, 2 solo game projects, and 1 group project. I’m learning a lot, and compiling quite a long list of things I want to learn and improve on.

One of my solo projects was to create a game concept and level design slice in Unity over one week (was that really just 2 weeks ago?!), which you can see on my YouTube channel here. It was meant to be a rough, whiteboxed prototype, but I wanted to create a cave, which seemed tricky to implement. Luckily I found the perfect lowpoly assets in the Unity asset store (including the crystals I wanted), so when I created the caverns for the level it ended up looking a more put-together than originally planned.

What’s the concept?

I love adventure games, so I wanted to create a game where the focus was on exploration, evoking feelings of wonder, curiosity, and discovery. You can see a glimpse of my Miro broad below (the artwork images do not belong to me & are for initial concept moodboard only).

I wanted the game to focus on gathering and crafting, in addition to exploring new places, with a heavy focus on story. Think a mix of games like Palia, Tomb Raider, Horizon Zero Dawn, and Astroneer. I recognize this is thinking quite big for what was supposed to be a simple game concept, but these are the kinds of games I’m drawn to. :)

I’ve now spent two weeks working on the project, and intend to keep testing features and improving upon the idea over the course of my education. So far I’ve been able to use Amtharus for two different assignments, the initial concept and level slice, and now FMOD implementation.

Here are a few things I’ve tested and implemented in the game, though I’m sure it will go through numerous future iterations as I find and learn better ways of doing things. I’m very new to coding, so I’ve been lucky my husband is a programming wizard and I can ask him for help when I get stuck.

What have I implemented so far?

• The initial level layout including a series of caverns and the character’s spaceship (which crashed and is currently beneath the planet’s surface)

• Assets from the Unity asset store

• Light effects to simulate the bioluminescence of the beetles and mushrooms

• Player controller (this went through several iterations, as I wanted to learn how to create one, from point-and-click to using a NavMesh)

Cinemachine camera (so much better than my first attempt!)

• Audio, including sound effects I created in Audacity and dialogue between the ship’s computer and my character (narrative was written by me and VO generated with ElevenLabs. I foresee it being much more dynamic & interactive, so lots of plans there!). I relied on a lot of triggered box colliders for implementation.

• Pickup

• Inventory system

• Minimap

• Quest system (I needed code help for this & it can be improved upon)

  I’m sure I’ve forgotten something, but this gives you a general idea of where I’m at with the project.

  So what’s your background?

  Assuming this is the first time you’ve visited my new blog, you might not know much about me (also very likely as I’m somewhat of a house gremlin :)). Prior to 2020, I lived in the USA and was a web content manager before I focused exclusively on my writing and self-publishing (I write epic & fantasy adventure novels!). My coding experience was limited to websites, so though I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to what C# looked like, it’s been a steep learning curve.

  My goal is to take my worldbuilding skills and bring that to games, as games allow for a much more immersive and interactive experience than a paper novel does. I’m turning 39 next month and have two kids under 10, so it’s felt a bit surreal to be a student again, but it’s also been a fun challenge. I’m not happy unless I’m being creative, and games is a very creative field! I look forward to seeing what’s next. :)

  Until next time!