Every time I get an extended break from school, I feel like I need to do something useful with it, something more interesting than just doing homework and drawing or whatever.
Turns out it’s really hard to come up with new game ideas. I’m stuck with a TON of super dumb ideas for more idle games, which I’m honestly tired of making because they don’t really have any interesting mechanics I can improve on and are mostly just playing with UI elements to show numbers going up. I’d like to make something more meaningful than that, but I am also worried about distribution which makes me stick to the mobile (android only) platform, and that really limits the controls and graphics I can use.
Also, I’ve been trying to learn Godot, because the Unity engine is starting to get on my nerves. There are so many weird, unintuitive quirks that really mess me up because I don’t know they’re there, and I end up dropping everything and coding around them for two hours. It’s rough going, and I think I need to review my programming concepts, since I haven’t done programming in a class for a long time. I’ll start by looking up basic OOP principles, and then I’ll draft a more complete idea for a game. I hope I’ll have something down soon that isn’t a straight clone of another game or another damned idle game.
Prototype for an game I started, realized was turning into an idle game, and consequently abandoned.
A List of Roadblocks
- Coming up with an interesting, unique idea that isn’t an idle game
- Making it simple enough to be played on a mobile device
- Designing new, coherent and intuitive mechanics, or at least combining existing ones in interesting ways
- Figuring out which engine to use and figuring out how to use it
- Research on a theme & setting, maybe writing a short story to fill in the background
- Learning the proper coding language to use the chosen language and how it interacts with the engine
- Thinking about screen space and scaling for devices with different resolutions
Anyway, that’s just what I wanted to get off my mind. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, after brainstorming for about 15 minutes. Feel free to take these ideas, but they’re mostly nonsensical.
- Endless running, snow shoveling, and zombies
- Cooking and running a shop
- An unconventional bullet hell
- Mining or fishing in exotic locations
- Antisiege
- Rhythm based platformer
- Alchemy/Combination of elements
- Infiltration - a heist and stealth
- Turn based duelling
- Gardening for poisons and selling them
- Cyberspace Tower Defense
- Arena combat
- Card based gardening
- Turn based roguelite
That’s it for now. Stay dry everyone.