*New* Unity 5 Game | What do you think?

News & General Discussion
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Hello everyone on the unity forums. I have recently started developing with Unity, but before I continue any further, I would like some input from the community. I decided to come here, directly to the gamers and developers themselves, for opinions. I am currently planning out a new game that I thought would be a good Idea, but I would like opinions on it before I start. (Don’t want to start a long project with a lot of hype only to find out the game is garbage.)

My Idea:

I have been thinking of an open-world/semi open-world type of game. Some of the features I wish to add/think would be nice are as follows:

  • Multiplayer
  • Open-world/semi open-world (large-ish map(s))
  • Not really a storyline, but something that definitely requires you to either work with or against other players.
  • ‘Survival’
  • AI: I have been thinking that using the traditional/generic ‘Zombie’ type of enemy is too boring. I want something a little different. I thought of maybe a demon type of enemy, something not so similar to every other survival game, but not too far off either.

As for your character, I thought of some basic traits/elements to watch out for.

  • Hunger
  • Thirst
  • Weather (too cold/too hot causes issues etc…)
  • Food spoils over time
  • Wounds do not heal on their own. Depending on the wound, you need a specific type of treatment.
    (Meaning if you’re shot 10 times in the chest, using a ‘bandage’ will not heal you… But i’m not gonna point fingers)

Anyways, these were just a few of the ideas I had. I was hoping to get some feedback/opinions from the community to see if this is something that you would play, or even be interested in. If you have any suggestions or criticism, please spit it out. I am completely open to it.Thanks!

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As a general rule, expect to read a bunch of posts explaining why you should start with something much smaller as your first gaming project.

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As Shiloh mentioned, a lot of us avoid reading posts like this and generally get kinda annoyed.
First games should always be very basic. Until you learn the concept of how Unity works. Once you at least start grasping how most things are done, go to the next level and make a complete game (practice game). With a few levels, let friends/fam play it, get opinions, blah blah). Then once you can make something, do another few of them, getting more technical. Then work on what you want.

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It’s just another generic survival game idea with a twist or too.

When you’re building a game like this, it’s not going to come down to what’s unique about the idea, its going to come down to what is excellent about the execution.

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Nah, I’m going different today. :stuck_out_tongue:

To build a generic game like this I would suggest downloading something generic from the asset store as your base. UnitZ is a popular one. It has the basic features you are after.

  • Multiplayer
  • Largish maps
  • No story line
  • Survival
  • Hunger
  • Thirst

The zombie AI in the kit is pretty basic, its move towards the player and jump every few seconds. This is relatively simple for a competent coder to upgrade. I would recommend rip and replace. Use the built in NavMesh and a basic FSM.

The kit has a day/night cycle, but no weather. It shouldn’t be too hard to implement something. Food spoilage is the same, its not built in, but its not hard to build on your own.

The damage system in the kit is just a basic health. The damage system is highly coupled with the character controller and AI systems. Rip and replace worked for me. Its not a simple task, but a competent coder should be able to do it in a week or two.

There are also crafting systems in the kit. You could turn them off if you really want too, but they seem to be quite popular in generic survival games.

If you have a competent coder on your team you could get this all done in a month or so. I can’t comment on the art requirements, but there are artists around that might give you an idea.

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Im not even gonna do the simple project thing, Im just gonna do the idea thing. Come back when you have something to show, because ideas are worthless

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Chances are if you make something that you yourself enjoy playing, then other people will too.

Chances also are if you make something that someone else already made better, no one will play it.

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There is no game here. Just an idea for one.

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Indeed, but given the context I think that’s perfectly cool. People should try to validate Big Ideas before they embark on building them. The developer is asking what we think, not telling us how awesome it is.

As for what I think…

I’m one who often makes these posts, and I stand by them. Big developments are great. And on occasion someone starts one as their first project and they do make something awesome and everything’s roses. Just… not usually. Because game dev is hard, there’s loads to learn, and carrying your early rookie mistakes through a big project makes it harder.

The point isn’t that making big games to begin with is impossible. It’s not. It’s just that I (and plenty of others) think it’s beneficial to cut your teeth on smaller stuff, learn from it, and work your way into bigger projects with the benefit of the things you learned from the small ones.

Now, honest feedback on your ideas: Not a single thing there grabs my attention.

I’ve seen loads of games that sound more or less like this. What’s going to make this one special? How are you going to grab my attention? I’ve got 500+ games in my library at home, so when I sit down to play a game what will make me pick yours over one of the other ones?

Generally speaking, just building your own implementation of a thing that’s already out there isn’t enough to draw a crowd. You need a strong unique factor. That could be a story, characters, a (strong) twist on established mechanics, a new mechanic, an art direction… virtually anything.

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I honestly feel like its best to encourage new devs to make the biggest game they possibly can, just make sure to tell them that if they have a problem, not to ask someone else to solve it for them.
They will fail, but you learn a lot of very practical experience

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I will go ahead and share my experience in case it helps anyone, as it is relevant to this discussion.

My motivation to learn programming was to develop games.
Even though this was before the phrase MMORPG was coined, I wanted to build what we would now call an MMORPG, because it sounded really awesomely cool. I was a naive enthusiatisc teenager, just like those that annoy us so much today.

I knew that I didn’t know how to build my final dream. I also knew that I didn’t want to complete a bunch of little games.
So I took a hybrid approach: I identified the skills needed to build the dream game, and then half-completed a bunch of smaller games built around that skill.

Relevant skills:

How to put put pixels on the screen (this was before GPUs and software OpenGL was absurdly slow).
How to read input from the keyboard.
How to hand-code an FSM so that the keyboard input moved the pixels around.
How to use python as a scripting language so I didn’t have to keep recompiling every time I changed the game logic.
How to use a socket for multiplayer.
How to play wav files for sound effects.
How to read pcx images off disk.

Developing those skills required coding a few half-completed games, in the style of:

Space invaders
Arkanoid
Asteroids
Mario (the original)
Super Mario (scrolling with parallax)
Wolfenstein 3D

And how did this pan out for me in the long run?

Plus side:

Became good at C++ and python
Developed fairly rounded computer science skills without taking any classes
Learned all those specific skills mentioned above
Figured out how to put together a basic game engine (simple rendering, physics, and networking, tied together with object management, scripting, and a main loop).
When OpenGL became practical, it was easy to learn.

Gave me the foundation and motivation to pursue an education and career in graphics software development that is serving me well today.

Downside:

To this day, I have never published a single game, or even half-completed one in polygonal 3D.

However, this isn’t so bad, because I just changed my mind at some point, and decided that I was into graphics programming, not game programming generally. Then I specialized further and further and further, until I was developing algorithms for very narrow simulation and rendering problems. To be a game programmer you need general skills, rather than being an expert at one effect.

My conclusion?

If you have your heart set on being a game developer, do what everyone on here always says:

FINISH a small game, then FINISH a bigger one, then FINISH an even bigger one.
The only thing I have to add, (some people say this, but not everyone): make sure that each bigger game
brings to the table specific skills that are needed for your dream game, otherwise you might be too unfocussed.

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I do disagree, because, for new developers, this is a massive let down. Telling them to stop trying to make something great and that they can do that in 5 years just sucks the motivation out of them. I know, thats the facts, and I do agree that you cant just make a big game with no experience, but telling them that its possible, it gives them a lot of motivation to go out there, learn, fail, and try again.

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I believe if you are a new programmer, making a big game at the start would be pretty crazy. But if you are in college/university for software engineering / computer science, and looking to make something big I don’t see why that is a bad idea. People wanna become a big fish, well you gotta learn to play like a big fish somehow. Sure the chances of failing are high still, but with INSANE amounts of dedication, spirit, research, I believe anyone can pull it off. People getting their degree’s with programming should technically be skilled enough to pull it off, heck it would be something huge to put on a resume either way.

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The trick to building a big project is being able to break the big project down into lots of smaller tasks and then complete all of those small tasks. An experienced developer can handle that. An inexperienced developer needs to learn how to do that. If somebody has never made a game before, they really should build a few tiny projects as learning experiences first.

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That’s just delaying the letdown until after a massive investment has been made. The letdown will be worse, and there’ll be a lot of time spent on a potentially misguided pursuit in the mean time.

Also, note that nobody’s telling them “stop trying to make something great”. I can see why it could be interpreted that way, but the intended message is “if you wan to make something great then this is how you get started”.

I wouldn’t suggest to someone that if they start learning to play guitar the’ll be on stage with Muse in a year. It’s not realistic. If hearing that they won’t be on stage with Muse in a year is enough to put someone off learning guitar then they probably weren’t interested for the right reasons in the first place - clearly they like the band moreso than the instrument. Same deal with game development. If it’s an idea that you’re interested in rather than the craft then you need to examine that sooner rather than later.

Plus, consider how many ideas experienced developers throw away even after they’ve started developing them. Things often seem great on paper or in our imaginations but don’t pan out in practice.

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What do you mean a massive investment. Its not gonna be any quicker in your method to learn, both have the same outcome, you learn something. You lose nothing from this way of learning, in fact arguably you gain more, because you say ‘Oh okay this game isnt gonna work, but Ive got these assets to use for my next game’ rather than ‘right then, theres tetris done. This isnt really applicable to the kind of games I want to make, but I did learn something’.

I didnt mean you literally are. But when you say that to them, its what they hear

I never made any mention that their game would be big. In fact I literally said that what its not realistic.
The best way to learn is by doing, and by failing. If someone tells you you cant do something, even if you take the advice on board, it will never fully set with you, which will change the way you work. Knowing you cant do something is much more reliable.
And yes I mean within game development, because I know someones gonna say ‘Nobody told you that you cant jump out of a plane and live and you still know it hurr hurr hurr’.

Thats a pretty good design lesson in my books. Thats happened many times with me, it happened very recently. I used whatever I could scavenge from my project and moved on. If things dont work out, its not a bad thing if you take something away from it.

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I mean the amount of time it takes to (genuinely attempt to) make a large game, as opposed to the amount of time it takes to do a reality check and decide it’s not actually something you want to do.

Really? For starters there’s plenty you only learn either post-release or at the late stages of a development cycle. If you’re making WoW in your bedroom then you don’t get to learn those things.

Code reuse is hard even for experienced developers. There’s no way I wanted to reuse stuff from my early projects in later projects. The learning gap even from one project to the next was big enough to warrant redoing things, and I can assure you it’s not because I’m a perfectionist - it’s because that was genuinely a quicker way to a better result.

Absolutely. So why push completion - and thus failure or success - any further away than it absolutely has to be? You’ll learn just as much by failing a small project as a big one, and you’ll learn it sooner, and get to benefit from it sooner when you start your next one.

Or, if you hate it, it took you far less time to find that out and decide to do other things instead. And that’s a good thing! I think a lot of people get wound up in helping others get into game dev without realisiing that it’s not a failure if they decide it’s not for them.

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Or if you think it’s goin to make you rich :wink: best to figure out the truth of game revenue early.

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See if you “think” you are going to get rich you are already incorrect. You gotta “KNOW” you gonna be rich, you gotta feel it deep down in your bones. If your project doesn’t give you butterflies when you open it up like the first time you kissed a girl, you haven’t found the one project yet!

I GET BUTTERFLIES EVERYDAY! But it could just be anxiety…I dunno.

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But your still gonna have to do just as many small projects as the time it does to make one big project. You probably learn about as much doing 1 big project and failing at finishing it as you doing 5-10 small projects

But those post release lessons arent something you get from a small game you are doing for learning purposes

Well I was referring to my art assets, but I can repurpose code just as easily. Its not literally a copy and paste job, but it saves so much time.

I completely disagree