Hi all,
6 weeks ago I was out with a friend who develops games and was inspired to want to create my own game. After some thought I came to the conclusion that i would like to create my very own 3D game. I have no experience in gamedev, blender or graphics design; but have programmed in C# as a web developer for about 10+ years. This has mostly been doing back end apis and web forms for businesses. Choosing to use c# was a bit of a no brainer for me as it kept me in my comfort zone to start development quickly.
The game idea / concept
I came up with an idea of creating a 3D prison simulator esq type of game that i have tentatively calledHMPen, whereby the player is in prison and is part of the prison economy. I decided I wanted to try to setup a game loop where the player starts off with some small balance and they need to take part in tasks throughout the game to earn their keep to buy things from the commissary. I'm thinking something like how New World had task boards that the player could approach and start a mission that reward the player with some currency for completing.
As i started this 6 weeks ago, and have already done a fair bit. The below is the update(s) of the things that I have been working on and learning.
Week1
I quickly got to downloading Godot 4.5 and toying around with creating a few things on a 3D scene, and usedBrackeys brackeys-proto-controllerto help me move around a 3D scene. I spent a bit of time trying to understand the script and ran it through chatgpt to convert to c# with almost no effort needed on my side to change anything.
After that I spent a few days in blender because I thought it would be a good idea to try and figure out how to make more complex objects. I set about trying to create a prison cell that i added to a scene that would form the game. I got rather ahead of myself and created a YouTube channel that I've been posting a few videos of my progress so far, even with not very much to show. I went down a rabbit hole of blender, and am still trying to claw myself out. There wasn't a lot to show in terms of game/progress, it was more a model that took me days to create. :)
Week2
Wing:
Layout:
Created a main scene, and a wing scene that has the prison cell models on. Allowing the player to walk around the start of what will be the prison.
Week3
I created my first character in blender with help of lots of youtube videos. It mostly consisted of trying to learn how to
model a character using the skin modifier that can generate the armature that i can use to animate and then import in godot. There was lots for me to unpack here - because I was experiencing problems in generating textures and getting them to show in godot. I didn't quite understand that generating textures by uv unwrapping them using procedural generation still needs to be baked into an image that is applied to the model. I got over my first few hurdles and exported my first player model, that i have changed a few times.
Week4
I created by first npc that i added to the wing scene, and experimented with adding path finding so that the npc would track the player and try and find them at a distance. I've since ditched that blender model. I spent a bit of time trying to structure the prison with placing grey boxes in areas that will eventually have things. (e.g. cells,shop, etc)
Week 5 & 6
Over the past few weeks with concept is maturing a little where i have been experimenting massively with some of the things that i have learned. My confidence growing with doing small things in both Godot and blender, I've been able to do some really cool things really quickly.
- Created a horrendous prison wall model
- Added some player die animations to the model in blender
- Added basic*Multiplayer* support
- Added a Commissary that gifts a bed (soon to change to be able to use your)
- Added a few enemies that are the player model that have a few janky animations from blender
- Created a bed model
- Created an hammer model that i have yet to attach to the players hand.
I need to elaborate on the multiplayer part, because I need to make this clear that it's not fully functional and has many problems that I am working on and will probably take quite a while to resolve. I always had multiplayer in mind when starting weeks before hand but thought it was super complex to do and it is. I am glad that I started trying to get it working in principle because all of the game logic changes accordingly...e.g. who has authority on a model to make movements etc. All of the animation that play need to use the Godot built in RPCs to notify the clients of player movements/animations etc. I'd like to add that I am not unfamiliar with network programming, I learned alot about socket programming in C many years ago and did MPI programming on my CS Degree years ago. The way godot uses RPCs to let players know about things that other players are doing such as movements and actions like picking up objects seemed quite familar to how passing info between processes work usingMPI.
Week 5 and 6 have been the most interesting so far. There is a lot more to see visually, and while not great to look at yet. There is enough there so far that I can start working on a simple game loop.
Thanks for reading! :)
