I didn’t say not to do modelling. All I said is that it’s not necessary to be able to do it in order to be a designer.
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I didn’t indicate you are wrong, or anything. Only that I don’t necessary agree, or (read) fully agree with your statement.
Yes you don’t need it, to be a designer, or just a designer. But my point was, that person can benefit from being familiar with such tools, as a designer. Therefore, is worth to get some hands on. That all was to it 
OK before anyone does a ‘can I make this’ have you checked the following:
- The team size of the games you want to mimic (teamSize).
- The time it took the developers to make the game worked out in hours (devTime)
Now work out your own values for the same variables…
- myTeam - Your team size.
- mySkillLevel - Your skill level compared to the original team as a ratio 0-1f
- myDevTime - How long you have in hours
Now run the following calculations…
amountOfGame = (myTeam * myDevTime * mySkillLevel) / (teamSize * devTime);
If your amountOfGame >= 1f then you can make that game with your team.
For reference here is a credits listing of…
Bloodborne → Credits | Bloodborne Wiki
Dark Souls → Credits - Dark Souls Wiki
PS: A rough calulation only, your 4 person team over 4 years working 40 hours a week vs Bloodbornes about 200 person team working about 2.25 years.
(4 * 58,400 * 0.5) / (200 * 65,600) = 0.00890243902439024390243902439024
Or you can make about 0.8% of Bloodborne if your 4 person team have half the skill level and can work 40 hours a week for 4 years.
Which does not seem like a lot but if you consider that the game has a world with multiple locations…
Then you could probably make one small chunk of this world and the enemies within that chunk at a comparable level of quality and playable in Unity.
If you add in a simplification factor >1f e.g. 2-5x simpler for low poly or low texture details then you can start to make larger chunks of this game world.
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What about making a procedural roguelike in a similar style, using this approach you only need to build up or buy a smaller set of props that your world building program then generates into a level.
Then you can focus on the more interesting aspects such as monsters and items that will appear throughout the game world.
More info on roguelike style game development Roguelike - Wikipedia
And there are dedicated forums and websites that provide lots of information on how to make a roguelike game with different styles of world generation.
Unity has a procedural caves example in the learning section as well as a simple 2d roguelike example.
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The biggest challenge here has gotta be keeping a team of highschoolers together working on something for four solid years.
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I think this is easily one of the most interesting replies I’ve gotten! I appreciate how you did all the math here. In 4 years, I was only thinking we’d get a prototype demo of the game done to show on a Kickstarter page or to a publisher. The game will also have a lower poly, more cartoony art style in the vein of Borderlands or The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
I’ve thought of this idea before, but I just couldn’t find a way for Souls-like gameplay to work in a roguelike/lite. This is because Souls gameplay is set up so the player learns about the levels they are playing in as they progress. The game teaches them how to overcome challenges by well… killing them. This is because every time you die, you lose your currency/XP, but you still have most of (if not all) your gear and you’re still in the same level you were in before, allowing you to learn the level, memorize it, and strategize around that. If the game was a roguelike, each time you die, you lose everything, and the level you return to has a completely different layout.
So are you learning the level or how to fight the enemies in the level, if it’s how to fight the enemies then the level structure or layout is less of an issue.
Also, you don’t have to re-generate the levels or reset the characters the main point I was making was the reduced amount of work from getting the game to generate the game world procedurally.
How else can you make 0.8% of a game look and feel like a 100% game world?
Or work smarter not harder!
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Well, I don’t exactly plan on making a 100% game world, in 4 years I just want a semi-polished 1 or 2 level demo with a couple bosses. That demo will be either shown on a Kickstarter or to a publisher to try to get funding and expand the dev team. The full game will be made after we have more money and manpower.
But on the topic of procedural generation, I actually had an idea for a different game that uses procedural generation similar to the way The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall did. That’s probably what I’ll end up working on if this project fails.
What even is a “100% game world”? Games are mostly smoke and mirrors. Most of what you think is there is implied, not actually there.
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Having watched the “Dan Sucks at Dark Souls” series by Extra Credit where they break down and analyze the gameplay mechanics and level design I’m of the opinion that it would be very difficult if not impossible to recapture the feeling of these games with procedurally generated worlds.
Procedural generation excels at games where the focus is on the player. Dark Souls, and other games like it, are very much focused on the world, having to learn it and the enemies that inhabit it, while trying to progress. You would need to have a very sophisticated algorithm to procedurally build a game that would satisfy a fan of the series.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvFQJa1XAXzyJzqqz6xxZXyPTLLGvJywC
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The full game level maps and sky boxes / scenery.
= No Man Sky Fail (procedural generated)
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Possible in the same way winning the lottery is possible.
Your biggest problems are going to be team cohesion, motivation, and experience level.
4 years is an incredibly long time to keep this together with high schoolers. Everyone’s lives are changing, you’re deciding what you all want to be as adults, and school work load is continually ramping up. I would expect the team to fall apart during that 4 years for any number of reasons. You’d be surprised how priorities change when one of your team members gets a girlfriend (or boyfriend) for example.
So what happens when there are differing opinions on the way forward? What happens when one of your team members doesn’t complete work they committed to? What happens when one of your team members drops out of the project? (and what happens with the work they already put in, and the knowledge in the area they were working on that disappears from the project?) What happens when one of the team members moves away for college? What happens when one of the team members gets an after school job?
I don’t know about how it works for everyone, but my friends in 9th grade and my friends in 12th grade were not the same people.
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agreed
You will make anything you want but it just won’t be anywhere near as good, but that might be OK though? set decent goals.
You can make anything what you want.
Bing Yang made playable game demo alone with AAA quality gameplay.
He’s also a longtime character designer and visual effects artist. He didn’t just come out and go “I’m gonna make a beautiful looking game.” There was a lot of stuff that came first.
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You will find a lot of the same sentiment in older people, we have all been young and ready to take on the world. But in time we learn we have two hands, one brain and only so much sanity.
Welcome to the world of game development. Everything is 12 times harder than it looks and takes 15 times longer than you think, and the results are always 40% of what you hope for. Experience and practice can reduce those penalties but that’s many years worth.
Your first game will suck.
Nobody will be impressed until you make something good and even then, meh.
If you can do it… as Morpheus once said, show me.
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My problem with the OP’s line of thought is the idea of making learning a skill (game dev) a means to an end (DarkSouls-like-RPG).
Learning is a lifelong thing, and if you’re making it in to something temporary and for the sole purpose of making X game, you are going to have problems.
1 year in: Ok we’ve learned about C# coding, and some basic Unity features. This seems sufficient lets get to work on game x! We also learned about algebra, a bit about statistics, and some history and some art.
2 years in: your friends go through their first breakups, so you lose a few ‘devs’ to post relationship depression and self pity, and the game is coming along but look and feels nothing like Dark Souls.
3 years in: you’re all getting close to graduation, reality is beginning to sink in. The project never really looked like DarkSouls or whichever aesthetic you wanted to go with. The code base is crap you soon realize, and it becomes ever harder to work on the project due to tight coupling, lack of modularity, etc. Stress is piling on and few of your friends want to/can work on it most days of the week.
4 years on: graduation is just around the corner. Your game is getting sidelined by preparation for college and the post high school life. You eventually realize its just not going to happen. Disagreements among your friends about it have caused a rift…
Don’t get me wrong, game dev is a rewarding experience. I fooled around a bunch as a middle schooler with modding and stuff but when high school came about I realized I had to prepare for the future, because it was coming ready or not.
Focus on your studies.
[edit] Go for game dev when you get in to adulthood and have graduated, and you’ve got your life in order.