Before Starting – What kind of game do I want to make?

This sounds like an obvious question… Of course you have to know what kind of game you want to create before you can create it! But this goes a bit deeper. Think about what FEATURES you want your game to have. It’s easy to say “I want to create a roguelike”, but that’s a genre that ranges from classic things like Nethack, to music-based stuff like Crypt of the Necrodancer, to side-scrolling platformers like Rogue Legacy. These all have quite different feature sets and vastly different gameplay.

If you’re not sure what kind of game you want to create, an old standby is to re-create something that already exists. Not COMMERCIALLY, of course, but more of a learning exercise. At the end of the process, you’ll either have a better understanding of your chosen engine OR you’ll be able to modify or change your cloned game enough to make it into something original – that’s how Stardew Valley started!

Personally, I just can’t bring myself to recreate something else that already exists. What I want to create is a roguelike that feels similar to Caves of Qud. Something RPG turn-based with a large non-linear world. I also love playing games that surprise me with their content, so I know my game is going to be heavy on procedural generation. I also love crafting and construction, so I want my game to give the player freedom to build a house or whatnot wherever they want. That already sounds like a pretty complex game, so I’m going to focus on simple top-down graphics. To keep myself from spending hours and hours on sprite art, I’m going to also limit myself to a simple color palette. I’m already getting ahead of myself a bit, so I’m going to stop with the detailed wishlist here.