You Can Bop Monsters! Game Dev #1 : I want to make a game, and my starting point.

Hello, how are you?

This is Hive account@rodent and I made this account to share my ideas as I make a game. I plan on mainly doing it as a video series (to hopefully draw a few people from youtube over here), but my initial attempt at that was to go about it informally... and that didn't work at all. Just a video of me saying "um" a lot while forgetting what I wanted to talk about. Soo.... need to figure out my video creation workflow better, but I'm pushing myself to write this article because I haven't gotten anything do with this project in two weeks.

I have decided to make a game!

There are a variety of reasons I have decided to do this, but probably the biggest is that I want to do something. I'm the type with a million ideas... and zero completed projects to my name. So I really want to just follow through with something. Some reason I chose a video game:

1. Lifelong interest. Compared to other interests, which have at times been more intense, I've thought about making games since childhood. So its probably an itch I should scratch.
2. It can be done online. A lot of my interests these days tend toward the local and the community... but, um, 2020 hasn't been a good year for those.
3. Multipotentiality Game design requires a collection of skills, and that provides me more things to play around with, and more opportunity to organically grow - I should learn some things making this game, and I'm interested to see what those things are.
4. Authorship. Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage's "Put Your Name On Your Game" talk is one of the things that pushed me toward this project. While I have chosen to associate this with my Hive account@rodent online identity over my personal, the general point still stands. Some of that can be called "ego" in the "things that human beings seem to like are actually all bad, so avoid things you would like" sense, but whatever. I fully plan on saying "Look! I made this!" when I'm done.
5. The ability to hit 'Publish' A lot of the things that interest me would be long term, ongoing projects. That's not what I need right now. I want to work on my follow through, and so I need a project that can be brought to completion, stopped, and then decide where I want to go from there.

Well that was boring. What's the game?

This is still poorly defined. I plan on using an iterative, "follow the fun" methodology. Based on my research lots of indie devs have found success with the style and it fits me better than others. So, I have ideas, but as I implement them and play around with them, I'll be trying to figure out what's fun, what's bringing the value and rescope and redesign from there.

As for a starting point the general plot will be that You Can Bonk Monsters! You will play as a character defeats monsters with their oversized mallet and they will have limited-use/consumable item drops that can then be used on enemies... and change their item drop.

As an example, say the monster is "Electric Bug" and when it gets bonked it drops a stun grenade. Well a stunned monster, including Stunned Electric Bug, would leave a different drop than their default.

So there is a bit of combo, chaining, or outright crafting system based on getting item drops and using them to get different drops. I think theres a lot I could explore there, from chaotic battles to puzzle rooms, "weapons" that actually make enemies stronger but leave more useful drops, and so on.

As a general design principle, I think I want to make it really a "make your own difficulty" type game. Basically balance it so a less skilled gamer can get in, get a good combination of difficulty and feeling of success, but have plenty of rewards for more skilled gamers to push the system, whether thats time/point scoreboards, challenge modes, extra content, different endings, etc. (all depending on which way the game goes when I start following the fun). I think that core item-chaining mechanism lends itself to that type of game and also should help me frame the game from the player's perspective.

I also kinda have a vague idea of what I want the player to look like. Sort of a question-mark shapey body with either an oversize head or a large mask? Playing around in Aseprite I had a couple basic designs:

Something like one of those? I feel like I have reference material in my head that I can't place, any idea what it is?

Speaking of Aseprite, my technology stack

Godot

I decided to go with godot as my game engine... mainly because I tried following Unity's tutorials and they kept glitching out so I went looking for alternatives. I like that it's open source, and seems to have strong support for 2D games. Hopefully it is a good fit.

I've played around somewhat with HeartBeast's Action RPG Tutorial, but just enough for me to start playing around on my own. I know from earlier attempts at programming I'm likely to get myself stuck in tutorial hell, so I need to focus on doing and not just watching.

Aseprite

Aseprite is pixel art/animator that after trying out the free trial I decided to purchase. While I could have saved a couple dollars just using gimp, since I have no artistic talent its super helpful to just have things simplified and designed for what I am trying to accomplish. I felt I could create nice-looking things just quickly messing around.

Playing around with making myself an actual avatar. What do you think?

Lospec

Lospec is a website to help you find color palettes to use. I think as a super inexperienced artist, getting color right would be one of the most important ways to improve and being able to use premade palettes is helping my practice look way less ugly. So this is a super useful website.

I am kind of stuck though. I really like Dreamscape8 and NOPAL-12... but those aren't what I had initially pictured for a game mechanic that is a bit cartoony. But I really like them.

Should I find a way to use them or find something more saturated?

That's it for now.

Just getting started but wanted to make sure I got something up early in the process. I plan on doing this less like a normal devlog, and more for using you all to springboard ideas off of, see if you got input to help me accomplish whatever it is I'm trying to accomplish. Don't think that came across in this introductory post.

But any ideas on the core mechanic, character/palettes, my avatar, or anything else I mentioned?