Alright, here comes another loving novel. Just need to rid this stuff outta my head.
For those who don't know; I'm working as a Unity Developer for a studio in Sydney (I got converted from an Intern to Contractor after only a few weeks). The job is about programming the front-end/client-side for a mobile platform. That is, an application which tracks friends, purchases and launches games within the platform. It's something mental to get your head around, which is why I won't bother going through it any futher.
About a week or two before I started, I began design on a LEGO VR game. That got shelved pretty hard when I was actually working as a developer; 9-5 Mon-Fri means I value my only free time (the weekends) a lot more for doing the things I used to do on the weekdays (such as play games or meet people).
Naturally, I've been itching to get back to work on my games, and while I have been fortunate to do some Unreal 4 night-classes (including one specifically in Good VR Design), I'm not entirely sure I've got it all together to start focusing on such a massive investment like a fully-fledged, experimental VR title.
So, what I'm proposing is a smaller project; a LEGO Point & Clock Adventure Game. The goals are simple:
- Nail down the process of importing/using LEGO 3D Models into the Unreal Engine and animating them.
- Understand the time-management issues involved with solo development in Unreal 4's workflow.
- Produce something.
The issue with the VR title is that I have to balance learning how to
make VR titles, make
good VR titles and learn intensive performance optimisation for VR
ALL without a personal VR kit (my brother, my old college and my workplace all have various VR kits, but I don't have on-demand access to those).
Point-and-Click games, theoretically, are easy. The mechanics are simplified, so gameplay design takes the brunt of the job.
My very first (and very stuff) game was a point-and-click, and more recently
my first hand-in for CS50 was a framework for point-and-click games in Scratch, and
my Major Project was an abysmal excuse for a Hover-and-Type Adventure Game (roughly the same thing). I've also
worked in Unreal 4 before (producing crap), so I'm familiar with the workflow.
Since it's 11:34PM, I'm gonna stop writing now, but I do want to jump into writing about good Point-and-Click Adventure design. There's an art to it which I've been practising, and I feel ashamed I didn't give myself the necessary amount of time to exercise it in my major project (for 90% of that project, the game was a simple mobile word puzzle game, and was changed at the very last minute with an extremely rushed story and a lot of placeholder art become "legit").
