I guess this is kinda my ‘hello world’ to the Unity community. As a TL;DR, I’m starting a big project and I’m looking for tutorials, resources, and advice on getting started.
I’ve gone through a couple of the tutorials (2D UFO, Space Shooter, and the reference/intro videos), but I always find the hardest part of a project is figuring out where to get started. I don’t know what component to build first. I’ll list out some of what I’m hoping to achieve when the project is complete, but I’m entirely aware that this is a project that is going to span a very very long time. Mostly, I’m trying to figure out where to start.
To begin with, I’m planning on having the game start at a complexity similar to Trimps. Build things, don’t worry about how the intermingle. Eventually it’ll turn into 3d ship design, but that’s a ways down the road.
I guess It might help to provide an outline of what I’m looking at, to get some feedback on a starting point. Something similar to StarTopia - but you build a colony ship travelling to a distant planet. You build and attach modules to a core, expanding until you have your vessel. Space legos, basically. Eventually, I plan to develop toward additional small modular ships to go out and do exciting things, but I’m trying not to bite off too much at once.
So far, I can see three major hurdles for this.
First, and probably the biggest hurdle from my perspective, and something I haven’t found tutorials on is incorporating an editor within the game itself. The player needs to be able to use prefabs to snap pieces on to each other, and then have them interact. I’m not sure if this would be one of the first, or one of the last items to develop in the project.
Second, AI. The bits need to function mostly autonomously. A repair droid needs to be able to roam, identify damage, and repair, visitors need to go drink water so they don’t die, security personnel need to escort miscreants to an airlock, etc.
Third, environmental context. When you’re between encounters, you’re flying through normal space and doing your construction. Somewhere similar to XCOM, where there are timed events and production. In this case though, your events might be something like a mineral rich asteroid field - do you harvest and risk asteroid collisions with the ship, or do you bypass? Hostile encounters, friendly encounters, neutral encounters, ambiguous encounters, etc. I’m expecting this to probably be the last part of the build.
I realize that this is a huge scope that I’m looking at creating, so any advice and recommendations are very very welcome. If there are specific tutorials or assets I should go through or study, I’d love to get some recommendations. I want to learn, and figure this out, so I can help other people figure out how to pull ideas out of their heads and into digital space.
Honestly, this description of the project makes it sound more complicated than it’s intended to be. Much of the game is going to be passive - people breed, resources are mined, facilities are built. The player doesn’t have to micromanage every facet, they’re responsible for the big picture, and I don’t want to turn this into a game where the player is trying to micromanage 4000 individuals while actively juggling turkeys blindfolded.
Sorry for the wall of text. I’ve done game design in board and tabletop, but this is the first real digital project I’m trying to tackle, and it’s in the top 3 most ambitious ideas I have. So… yay. Any advice that anyone has to offer is extremely welcome, because I have no idea where to start. Probably with something less ambitious - anyone have an idea for something simpler I could expand into this?