Full disclosure, I am just starting to play around with Unity and I know I have a lot to learn.
I am working through basic tutorials at the moment just making my first thing, generously called a game. However, in the future I would like to start working towards a small, watered down version of my favourite game, Baldur’s Gate 2 (though Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2 etc. cover the same ideas). With that in mind I was hoping you, the community, might have some suggestions on the key skills/elements I would need to learn to work towards that. From a game design perspective I understand certain required aspects but I am not sure of their fundamentals and therefore unsure where I would focus to start learning how to do those bits, e.g. navigable maps from a flat painting, sprite creation etc.
Any advice, pointers or other worldly wisdom would be greatly appreciated!
Here are 200 tutorials on creating a single player RPG. It’s not specifically BG2 style, but by the time you finish it up a couple of times, you should have a much better idea how to accomplish what you wish. You’ll probably have to downgrade to an older version of Unity to do much of it, but again, when you finish it you’ll be much better suited to upgrade the code.
Believe it or not, there’s no significant difference between making a full 3d game vs making baldur’s gate style game. (aside from camera angle and few minor gotchas). “Making flat map from a painting” is a minor detail, for example.
You’ll need to learn everything, and it doesn’t really matter where you start first. Start working your way through tutorials/documentation.
Thanks for the feedback guys. I am only planning on doing it for my own experience so I won’t worry about anything so far off as community management, but given the consensus is “everything” I have a long road off in front of me. Though if there’s only 200 tutorials I guess will be back shortly to ask for more!
@frosted Thank you for the suggested order of approach.
I definitely need to catch up on my programming. Honestly, the art worries me the most. As a non-artist is that likely to be a big stumbling block?
I´d suggest you make a few smaller tutorials and get a hang of how everything in programming works, mainly various collections, inheritance and common patterns, then you can make your game just with docs and a bit of google.
Art is a beast and I gave up on learning Blender and am slowly starting to draw watchable pixel-art. 3D modeling is definitely a great skill though, you can do it.
For music you can look into LMMS, it’s like FL Studio but free, and with some free synthesizer like Synth1 you can make great music, just watch a few music theory lessons.
If you want a good game that most people will enjoy, in the style of a BG or Wasteland, then art is going to be something that needs to be quite good. You will need to either learn to be a competent artist, or spend money to convince competent artists to do work for you.
If you want a good game, but decide to use something closer to a legend of Zelda, then perhaps the skill required goes down. You will still spend a tremendous amount of time on a game like this to reach ‘fun’ levels. Perhaps a year if you’re working on it full time.
If you just want something to mess around with and have fun trying to do, for yourself, then you can just enjoy the process of learning itself.
A top down party based RPG like Wasteland or BG will require a massive effort to accomplish. If you do not have skills coming in, realistically you’re chances of getting the game to a point where other people have fun playing it is extremely slim.
I might suggest giving modding a shot instead of game dev, as this is probably a more realistic way to get something fun completed, although it all depends on your goals.
If you don’t have the skill or money for good art, you always can go more abstract, there is a lot of games with simple graphics which are fun and sell well.
I appreciate modding would be easier, but not nearly so satisfying for me. Am I perhaps being naive about the requirements to get something like this together? Don’t get me wrong, if we’re talking scale, heck yeah it would take an eternity of me tinkering to get something like BG2 up and running. But if we are talking scope I am surprised it would be so significant. If I wanted to get to a point where the basic elements where in place would it be so substantial? “One map, two player party, one NPC, inventory, conversation tree, inventory management, combat” sort of thing?
@Pagi@Kiwasi Damn, I hadn’t thought about music much. I guess I hoped I could put together something inoffensive on loop in the background. Unlike art, it wouldn’t be so jarring if it wasn’t there.
Pagi, you’re right about being abstract. Though that will take some clever design to make it work.
