Hello! I’ll be using this thread to document my progress while building a mobile strategy game. This is my first game and I’m newish to programming. I realize the importance of starting with a simple snake or pong game, but I’d rather gradually build the game I want while learning along the way. This will end up being the more-challenging, yet more-rewarding, path.
I made a video about why I’m creating my own game. Basically, the reasoning comes down to multiple factors. The first is that I’ve always loved games. The second is what I’ve been doing primarily for the past several years is advertising and marketing. I started as a copywriter, which I consider to be an emotionally-driven, sales-based job. You can say I’ve had success.
For the past 4-5 years, I’ve been traveling the world non-stop while living and working from hotels. To date, I’ve visited 35-40 countries. At the time of this post, I just wrapped up 2 months in Dubai; and, I’m currently in Istanbul… weeks away from getting married!
So, back to gaming. While working in advertising, I’ve also been involved with buying media and tracking campaigns. Doing this is very satisfying – I love analyzing the data and seeing how to improve my results. For all of these reasons, I’ve decided to combine my talents with my interests and create the game I want.
I started with Unity, but found it to be too overwhelming for a beginner. One of the programmers I hired (before I decided to program the game myself) recommended Defold. I’ve been a Defold user for weeks and while it can be challenging, I’m already getting satisfying results.
Here’s an example of what I’ve created so far — a sandbox for my game:
Features I’ve implemented so far:
- Custom render for background
- Orthographic camera
- Click to move camera
- Mouse wheel to zoom in/out
- Smooth animations
These are all basic features, but they took me some time to learn. I wrote my code based on answers in these forums and the examples/tutorials from Defold. I realize there are assets I could have used, but I wanted to understand why and how these features worked. I feel like this will be important down the road.
About the game: it will be a strategy-based game with a medieval theme. There will be armies to fight with and merchants to collect resources from other towns on the map. I have A LOT of ideas to implement, but I’m taking things one step at a time.
Now that I have the basic camera and controls set up, I think the next step is to think about the hex tiles or the buildings/units. Lots of directions to go in!