It is not a graphically complex or detailed game, but I think this style of graphics is very pleasant and perfectly adequate for expressing action and emotion. While I get that games like GTA and Skyrim obviously need teams of 40 or more, how much of that is due to graphical fidelity? Ogre Battle 64 had a team of 13, including the producer, 2 directors, and 3 composers. It had only one programmer. Would it be feasible to produce something of the same scope by myself, if I didn’t worry about composing music or advanced artwork?
Follow-up question: Related in the vein of graphical fidelity, would it be possible to create an open-world game in the vein of Bethesda games if the scale were severely cut and the graphics were old-school (like Morrowind levels of fidelity) and/or using tons of asset packs?
If you read the post, thank you very much for your time. Any help is very appreciated. I’m just a hobbyist not intending to make some deep dive into game dev right this moment, so my only motivation here is understanding.
Would it surprise you if I told you that it was less about the quality of the assets and more about their quantity? Open world games need a tremendous quantity of assets to feel believable. While the asset store may have some fantastic packs it simply doesn’t have enough of them and they don’t really fit together very well.
For starters, you would need a competency level with Unity somewhere between intermediate and advanced. You just showed up so I have no idea about your skill levels, but if you’re just starting you would need to go and learn the basics and ideally make some small games before you started a project like this.
Additionally I recommend checking out the following discussion. There were a number of assets recommended in that thread including by me that would greatly assist with the process. Some of them are code-based too like procedural world and level generators.
Making a game look simple may save you some time on art production but you still want the art to look stylized and good so it’s still going to take time and require skills. As for everything else it still takes the same amount of time essentially so it has all to do with the complexity of the game itself.
Creating an open world type of game in reduced size is probably doable as long as you limit not just the amount of content but also the complexity of the game. For example just implementing the spell and ability system of Morrowind or Skyrim would take a loooong time unless reduced in complexity.
Super helpful guys, thank you. Especially eXonius, your comment about the spell system in Morrowind. I didn’t realize aspects like that could really take that long to make.
Honestly I’m inclined to disagree. Morrowind and newer Elder Scrolls titles are built using GameBryo which is an ancient game engine by todays standards (it was initially created in 1991) and as far as I’m aware lacks the component architecture found in Unity which can make life much easier.
If I were approaching the magic system I would create components for each part of the spell. Components for handling the different types of damage, components for handling the way the spell is delivered, components for handling which enemies are affected, and so on.
After that you simply combine the components as necessary to create the spells you want. Changing the damage type, the delivery type, the enemies affected, etc to create variants or entirely new spells would be trivial with this approach.
For the skill system many of them are simply modifying unseen variables that influence the behaviour of actions. Only a very minor number of them would require complex scripting but even then the behaviour is often not unique (eg archery and block both share a slow time effect with a dragon shout).
