Developing a game is a massive, just completely massive undertaking. It is really no joke, no joke at all. Probably 90% of game development attempts will fail, as the amount of work is historically underappreciated and underestimated. I am completely aware that this will take at least a year. I am ready, willing and able.

When I was very young, I told my dad I wanted to learn to code so I could make a game like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (it had just come out and it was absolutely state of the art). He laughed and said I had no idea what I was talking about and I would never be able to. LOL he was right, but also… wrong. Suck it Dad, I’m making a File System Survival game! 

So here are my thoughts as I prepare to depart on this journey.

My very first step will be to hack together a working prototype of the main game loop. This will consist of creating a simple desert, putting a treasure at the end of a node, and creating a dead simple limiting mechanic you must fight against in your attempt to find the basic treasure. Upon finding the treasure, you will get a reward and the game will end. This is the absolute bare minimum form the game will take and will define the format for a “file system survival” game.

This demo will also be Windows only as I do not yet have the hardware required to begin cross-platform functionality. This is a humongous challenge to me, as most of the tools in my magic bag of OS tricks are written for Windows and I will have to basically start from square one to replicate them for Mac OS. That is something we can all discover together and I hope my research posts will help future OS hackers accomplish their dreams.

After I create my prototype for the engine and my bare minimum game loop, I will have to back off coding for a while and develop the story, milestones, rewards and overall path through the game. This is the most important step, and one that I will be forced to give due diligence to. It will be a tragedy to devote so much time to a project that is not well thought out and poorly designed. No matter how clever or clean my code is, if the story/design is not compelling, the game will fail.

The design stage is of course to determine what systems I will actually need to write, to prevent moving development goalposts halfway through production.

So these are my initial thoughts as I approach my goal of a bare minimum prototype by the end of the week.

Up next will be an overview of the high level architecture of the first demo along with some code snippets and initial organizational thoughts before I start focusing on specific subsystems.

Till next time - M