Hello, I have a question for you, what would you advise me on a few things because I am planning to make a tower defense game with, let’s call it, innovations that are unusual in this genre
- What program should I use to create textures, graphics and backgrounds and animations for example, I have a drawn opponent and I would like to make death attack walking animations for him
- Is there any website or program you would recommend for music?
For now, the entire project will be on paper, and only when I write everything down will I start translating it into Unity.
You have to understand what are you signing up for. You will have to learn a lot of stuff and that is not going to be easy. Firslty you should get a bit into programming, which personally for me took like 2 months to begin and a couple to have a grasp on what am I doing. This is never enough to make a game, but a musthave sadly, unless you got other working for you. This is not an easy task.
For 2D graphics I sadly can’t say anything except it’s not trivial to make it not looking like trash. GIMP might be handy for 2D redacting. Tho you can convert 3D into 2D which is not uncommon, but becoming a 3D guy is it’s own long journey. Blender and Substance Painer might help there but I doubt you are going to go there.
For music, eh… Audacity for some simple editing, but for creating music you would need a DAW, and weeks/mounths of composing and optionally sounddesign experience. If you go into it I d recommend FL Studio, but I also doub’t you will go this far. So yeah, download some free music or maybe make some freelancers to make it for you, it’s not really expensive. I personally got some stuff from pixabay and random free sound libraries.
And speaking about planning, the worst time to planning out everything is… At the beginning. So it would be good to start with a vague plan at the start and reiterate planning later. Especially if you are planning to make your first game.
P.S. I might be wrong. I would like to hear other opinions saying that gamedev is not that hard and there are plenty of more simple solutions at every aspect I was talking about. But I think it’s a really hard job. Not really difficult, just really, complex, and time consuming.
I agree with @BlackyPootis, especially about the planning. In game development 1 million things can go wrong and even the most experienced developers if they can predict 100 of those before they even start production they would be geniuses.
You should have a rough idea about your game, but start implementing small things as soon as possible to get a feel about the protentional problems.
If this is your first game start with something really small. I don’t mean another small game, but make a small thing that exists in the game you are thinking.
For example, if you want a tower shooting things, first make a square that shoots circles, then go to a program to draw a tower sprite and add it to Unity, then make an attack animation for the tower and back to add it to Unity, then make the same things for the circles, make the arrows bullets or whatever your tower shoots, then add another tower that gets hit by those, then add hits detection, then go make the hit animation for the tower and back to Unity to add it to your game, then try to add the sounds etc.
This way, you will learn different aspects of game development, find out which things you are good at and where you may need help, but also you will get an idea about how much time you need to make each one of those, so that you can scope you game in a way that can be completed in a reasonable time.
Continuously adding small things, instead of planning everything at the beginning will give you more experience and more chances to complete a game, even if eventually turns out to be a game smaller in scope than the one you would have, if you had made the whole project in paper.