Devlog #1: My first game

Hey everyone!

Welcome to my first devlog and first game. I will start by telling a bit about myself. My name is Mart, I am 18 years old and I study Software Engineering right now. I have been programming for 5 years and doing a bit of gamedev on and of. But never actually finishing a project, just shelving them.

My problem was that I was taking on projects that were too big. So I decided to get a little idea in my head and start with that. Then slowly build a concept but still keeping it as small as I can. Then Explo kind of got into my head. A small game where you just run around interacting with things and people and just following a small story maybe. It is still a very vague idea in my head but it is getting somewhere!

I hope that with these devlogs you can get a little insight into what I want for this game and at the same time do some marketing. I am almost 99% sure the game will have a "Pay what you want" price model. I hope you will be enjoying my devlogs as much as I like creating this game!

I started of with an idea. Just a generated tile world where you can walk to the specific tiles. I open my IDE and start typing away. I am using Java as the language and LibGDX as the framework for the game. I use my own build Entity Component System and after a few hours I created this:

Okay that's good! It is working like I want it too. Now, the art sucks. And I suck at art. Time to do some digging for free assets. I stumbled onto this amazing tileset made by 0x72. I made a small area with walls and objects and then started improving movement. Now you cant walk into walls, or click behind a wall to walk to the tile. You have to be able to see the tile from your characters perspective. Now I have this:





Okay that is even better! Looks good, movement works like I intended. Now next on my list seems to be NPC's. I started putting objects in the tiledmap that represent spawn points for Entities. Add a spawn point for the player and the first NPC. After I finished that I wanted to indicate you could interact with entities.

Because I am working with an ECS I can just add certain components on entities and it will do its magic. Putting the Interact Component on something will popup a small indicator that it can be interacted with when a player is on an adjacent tile. So far so good:

That is all I really have for now! I know my writing skills are not as good as I want them to be. Also grammar mistakes will be found, surely. But I enjoyed writing this :). I also created an imgur album to keep up with the progress. Just some gifs and pictures.

Thanks for reading! And hopefully until next time!