Hey guys, Ali here.

Before any kind of self introduction (I’ll write a post eventually) or writing about my development endeavors at my actual work, I wanted to start a series on my next side mission: game development.

This is a post to remind me of when I took the feeling of one day wanting to make a game and took actual action towards it; I want to make a habit of looking back at my posts to remind myself of both how far I’ve come and how much I still need to work hard towards my first creation.

So, first things first: in what order should I start developing?

Setting my priorities straight

I decided to lay this plan out because I’ve been a little over the place when it comes to learning game development. I’ve been watching a bunch of Unity, Blender and Aseprite tutorials. Creating my first isometric tileset was fun; drawing my first pixel Tactics-style character was fun: my first tile selection algorithm was fun. The thing is, when you’re doing it without a specific purpose and a deadline, to be honest it’s really just fun. Since I didn’t have a specific project I wanted to materialize, I didn’t actually know if the knowledge I was getting was something I was actually going to use. Simply put: you need to decide what you’ll do and learn as you go and select actual useful material.

So, my first thing will be: a mock of League of Legends. I love the camera angle, the skill sets and damage calculations (and of course the effects).

1. Focus on the important parts and write your basic algorithms

Once again, I can’t spend a thousand hours on the fun stuff and never get this demo done. So I’m starting with no visuals, no FX, just logic. The first iteration will literally be a bunch of cubes moving around a field. You press Q, your cube fires a sphere towards the cursor. It hits? Damage. That’s it. That’s already enough work:

• Creating the map, the map objects, the player objects.
• Moving player with clicks
• Collision Detection (when walking)
• UI for HP, MP
• Player input
• Collision Detector (for skills) & damage calculation
• Skill Cooldowns
• UI for skills
• Death and respawn
• Shop
• UI for items

2. A little flair: animations

• Get free assets for moving 3D player characters. Learn to toggle standing/walking/casting/attacking.
• Set animation for skill (flying/on hit). Just do all spheres on the first run.
• Textures for floor and objects.

3. More flair: sound effects

• Set a loop song to the stage
• Sounds on casting/skills hitting/melee attacks
• Try positioning sounds according to camera position

4. Multiplayer

• Be able to invite at least another person to play with for a 1 vs 1 setting

5. The fun stuff

• Creating objects and textures for skills in Blender

And that’s what I can think of to start. This list will probably change, but I just needed to leave this initial step on record. From the next post on, I’ll be posting Unity screenshots and video clips as I progress with the project!