Hey there! I'm Bloomzeye, and I'm jumping right into indie game dev and design.
Literally, it will be two months on the 12th.
I've discovered that making an indie game, even a small one like I'm doing can become overwhelming in a hot second (turns out it's not easy! Who would've thought?).
After doing a good chunk of reading, watching, and listening to other game devs and publishers, I've broken my development process into four main phases:
My Development Phases
Phase One: Writing
Write out the overall gameplay, story, and plot.
Add ideas for sound effects, and write out some musical scores or lyrics (if any).
Consider creating at least a one-page outline to be your Game Design Document (GDD). This will be a growing document as the game development progresses.
Phase Two: Design
Doodle around and find your concepts on how you want your game to look.
Think about putting together a mood board of your game and perhaps a few for each level/scene.
Create sketches for your levels and scenes, play around with color palettes, design your backgrounds, enemies; basically, anything you've written down in your (GDD) document.
Phase Three: Animation
Start the animation process for each character/asset needed.
Organize and export each sprite into a sprite sheet to be imported into the game engine.
After you have your designs and animations down, you can create the title/start and game over scene, game logo, main webpage, merch, etc.
Phase Four: Programming
Find a game engine and a programming langue to learn.
Follow a crash course in your chosen programming language.
Research the learning curves for the game engine and programming.
Or look into Visual Scripting.
(And don't feel guilty for buying pre-made assets!)
Phase ?: Marketing and Promotion
This step is (and probably should be) an ongoing process. As a solo artist, I tend to focus entirely on my art and development. I'm still figuring out what type of marketing and promo strategy works best for me, which is why this devlog took so long to post...
Target which social media platform to share/launch your game on, and start building an audience there.
Grab a social media handle for various platforms (this is mainly for future planning).
Do you need a website? You'll probably host your game on a platform like Itch.io, Steam, or Humble Bundle, but having your own website can build up your street cred and give you a home base (and a place to put a browser-base game).
Having a place to share your videos can also be part of marketing since it shows people what you're up to.
I'm breaking each task into even smaller parts, and since I've started in June 2021, I'm in my final phase: programming. My only downside is that I know myself. The more I learn about game dev and programming, the more I want to add to my game! I need to rein myself in and let this first game be my baby steps.
After doodling my first concept scene in my sketchbook, I created a checkbox for each character and the elements I will need for the first playable level. I'm a visual learner, and I love checking things off.
After I set some plans, I eventually finished designing my main character, Kiwi the Bee, the points counter, the background, and enemies. The only thing I didn't keep from my original sketch was the health bar. (My art process blog post will be next!)
Since this is the first time I'm learning to create pixel art, it's been a bumpy learning curve. But, I've adored the pixel art program I'm using called Aseprite, to design and animate everything in. I started learning pixel art around the beginning of June 2021, and I'm really proud of how far I've come.
It's only a few weeks into August, and I'm nearly done with my first indie game! All I have left is to finish up the programming, add a few title scenes *cough…design them to start with...cough* and finish up some animations.
I keep reminding myself to take each part little by little, and it will all eventually stack up to something great.
I'll work on focusing to create a devlog every two weeks, and you can subscribe to my newsletter to get notified when I do! And I’ll be working towards sharing videos as soon as I can edit them.
Until then, thank you for reading!
– Bloomzeye
Find me on:
Comments