I keep deliberating and rethinking what I’m going to write for this first post so I might just start with a bit of history and roll into what I’m planning to make.
So about a million (five) years ago before I started working full time I was working on a game called Dragonspawn 2; a sequel to this shit game here. At the time I was unemployed and generally had a lot of spare time between searching for work and sleeping so I was overly ambitious and things got out of hand pretty damn quickly.
To cut a long story short I wasted a lot of time developing useless features like procedural sky and weather systems instead of doing useful stuff like fixing some of the buggy source code pulled from the original game and writing actual integral gameplay systems.
Eventually I found some good full time programming work to help pay the bills, and with that, work on what would have been Dragonspawn 2 tapered off over time. Eventually the pointless features I was working on became side and hobby projects for me. The sky/weather system, colorblind utilities, and even a terrain generation system (what the hell was I gonna do with that anyway?). These all took president over Dragonspawn 2 and it sort of just died a slow uncoordinated death, but it was probably for the best in retrospect. To put it bluntly Dragonspawn 2 was in development hell, it took me a long time to take a step back and realize this, and at that point trying to save the game was impossible.
So I took some time off from it, occupied myself with other things and eventually began writing up a new design document that was heavily critical of the original game as well as the failed sequel. And I’m confident that what I’ve got now in terms of design is a monumental improvement over the original and sticks to a more achievable, concrete set of specs.
So the game I’ll be developing and chronicling on here is just going to be called ‘Dragonspawn’, it’s not a sequel, it’s not a remaster, if anything it’s a reinvention.
I’m still working out how exactly I want this blog to function, my next post will probably be the obligatory one about what software and design practices I’m going to be use/applying to this game’s development and will more than likely outline the exact genre and style in more depth.