Intro

Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was one of the first video games I ever played. I was just old enough to read and way too young to even make it deeper than the first few levels. Like everyone else my age, I was obsessed with Pokémon, Digimon, and Monster Rancher, but the two games I spent the most time with were Dragon Warrior Monsters and Might & Magic VIII: Day of the Destroyer. They sum up the inspiration for this project. I want to avoid the typical Pokémon tropes, but I’ll inevitably be influenced by them. I'm envisioning a mix of Monster Rancher and Siralim, combined with the movement and exploration of an old-school, first-person dungeon crawler. Alternatively, I'm also considering real-time, team-based combat with boss fights.

Goals

My goal isn't to launch a game, blow up, and become a millionaire. I've wanted to make a game since I was a kid and first touched a keyboard. This will be a long project with the aim of learning and eventually releasing a playable game. I've built other games in Unity in the past—simple ones, mostly from courses—but this is my first real attempt at my dream game. The thought makes me cringe, as this is a story as old as time. I hope I can leverage my web development experience here, even though I'm entirely new to GDScript.

Inspiration

• Wizardry
• Might & Magic VIII
• Dragon Warrior Monsters
• Monster Rancher
• Siralim
• Azure Dreams
• Digimon

Approach

I've never made a game in Godot before, and I haven’t actually used Godot at all. Aside from a few Unity tutorials, I haven't built anything in game development. I definitely have the advantage of understanding basic programming, but for the most part, I'm starting from scratch, and most people should be able to follow along. This is why I'm starting this devlog—to keep myself motivated and to document how I go from zero to launching an actual game.

I need to break the game down into components, systems, and basic features so that instead of facing a daunting, unrealistic project as a whole, I’m looking at manageable, independent projects. This approach will give me a sense of progress and achievement. Otherwise, I'm worried that scope creep and the sheer number of things I want in the game could prevent it from ever happening. This is how I recommend approaching any large project: if I went into this unorganized, I would never get anywhere because I’m already thinking of so many different things I want.

Requirements

I'll revisit this section in the future. I think to start I need to get the decision of 2d or 3d down and then get a sprite that is moving around the screen.

My first order of business is running through the free courses available at https://www.gdquest.com/