Research and Skills

One of the parts about game development that you learn pretty quickly when you are trying to make one by yourself is that you probably don’t know how to do all of the things needed to make it, by yourself.

I started by going with the things I’m already good at and dug into the development stuff. I’ve been researching coding in GDScript and as practice I coded the system that parses the world seeds into the values that are hiding in them. Next, to ensure determinism in my world generation I wanted absolute control over my random number generation. This would eliminate the chance of a PRNG being implemented differently in the engine and making my generated worlds no longer what the seed says they should be. To that end, I ported the TinyMT32 pseudo random number generator from C to GDScript and I also ported OpenSimplex noise generation from the Java version to GDScript to help assign biomes to the world map. (Yes, I’m aware there is already OpenSimplex functionality built in.) This barely counts as coding anything for the game, but I got some practice and made a few things that will hopefully be useful in the future.

I’ve also been learning about and practicing making pixel art. I’m not good at it and I’m probably missing some of the tools needed to do it well, but I’m obviously going to need a TON of it for the game. I’ve been looking into a decent drawing tablet, but I can’t really afford one and I’m a little afraid I will end up getting one and then also have to pay someone else to make my art for me.

I have very close to zero musical skills. I can imagine what sorts of music would work well in my game, but have no idea how to produce it or what tools would be involved. The same is true for the sound effects that I would need for everything from shooting your gun to jumping. I’m already resigned myself to needing to pay someone to make the music.

The next thing I was trying to figure out was the story for the game. I am a reasonably decent writer, I think, and I know enough about the game I want to make. Those things inspired a bunch of research into Greek gods and goddesses, largely using a copy of the Theogony by Hesiod. The things I found allowed me to glue together enough of a story to make a replayable game make sense. New worlds, and even an explanation for why you need to keep collecting all your power-ups again in each new world. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but I have figured out a reasonable description of the story loop.