Phase 1 - The idea

Hi again!

Sorry for the delay, but I got injured playing Volleyball, and after being at the hospital, I had to organize a few things, which kept me busy from writing here. That was the first downer of the week, the second one was, at least for me, even worse. While I was working on this project my working environment crashed and left me with a corrupted project, which ment I had to start all over. Well, bad for me, good for you, as I'm able to show you now everything from scratch. So let's start, shall we?

Basics

I will use Unity3D as my game engine. Even though not exactly cheap, it's perfect if you want to publish for different environments, in my case: Android and IOS. Another thing that I absolutly love about Unity is its AssetStore. Let me be clear, I'm a programmer! I know how to use Photoshop, but I'm not creative enough to make my own textures, GUI and so on. I know Maya a bit, but I'm not even close to making professional Models. That is why a lot of things I'm using in my games are bought, at a reasonable price. Even if you are a "Programmer-Designer-Modeler", doing everything alone would take forever, and I want to finish this game in my lifetime. 

The Idea

As you might imagine, every project starts with an idea. Coming up with an idea is easy, but finding out if it's possible to make it, if it's a good idea that people will like, and, and that is the most important thing, if you like it yourself enough that you will actually finish it.

Since my last project was a strategy game, I figured, I should do something in this direction again, since I already have most of the Know-How to create such a game. This time I want to make something like WarCraft. It won't be a clone, but it will have certain aspects of the game. Since I want to build the game for mobile devices, it has to be short, by which I mean one game shouldn't take longer than maybe 10 to 20 minutes. In addition, this game will be a lot less complex than WarCraft, making it easier to develop, but also easier to understand, which is critical for mobile games. It should have a both singleplayer and multiplayer to keep the game interesting, so that people will buy some InApp products.

Look and Feel

Well, long story short, here's a screenshot of my GUI so far:

Top right: The inventory - there will be onlygold and food to keep things simple.

Bottom left: The map

Top middle: This will be a dragable component to multi-select, send and cast spells. (More on this coming soon)

Bottom middle: This will be components that show up when something is selected to let you build or attack things. Example: You selected a worker, now these show the different kind of buildings you can build. Drag them onto the world to build them.

Bottom right: Here you will have the informations about the thing you currently selected, in this case a townhall.

The Plan

I want to have a running prototype (Menu,one map, single player and multiplayer) before march, so I'll try to stick to this:

27.01. InGame-Setup (Starting the level/map - setting of players, buildings, mines, etc.)

29.01. BASIC Interaction (sending them around) with RTSUnits (Workers, Warriors etc.) 

19.02. Complex interaction with Workers - Building things

22.02. Running Inventory-System

26.02. Menu

14.03. Complex interaction with Warriors - Attacking
20.03. Complex interaction with Heros - Casting spells
23.03. GameOver/Won - conditions

28.03. Multiplayer Setup

Thats it for today!

Thanks for reading!

PS: Almost forgot: Here's some artwork so that you can imagine what this game is going to be/feel/look like.