This was not the post I intended to write today!

What I wanted to post today was a mostly fleshed out concept that I had half written up yesterday, but I've changed my mind and decided to go in a different direction 😅

The concept I began writing up yesterday is an incredibly ambitious idea for a first project. An open world turn-based strategy RPG with a very complex story and conversation model. It is too big, too involved, too intricate, and will take me years to make by myself. Even to just implement a basic demo I think would take months given the complex interactions I was designing. Not to mention that almost none of the graphical resources I currently have would be useful in this game, and digital art is probably my weakest ability in this whole endeavour.

So to my mind that is a bad first project, and I am going to put the idea away for a while. I will still work on it, but only conceptually - I won't be implementing anything towards it for a while.

I do have another concept that has been bouncing around my head for quite a few years - a story-based action RPG similar to Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (I have half a memory that this was the first game I ever owned and finished on PC!).

It is a fairly large project too, but most of the "size" of this concept is in story and level design, and less in implementing complex features.

Focusing on a single level for now would enable me to narrow down an appropriate feature set for a demo, and logically the first level would be a good choice since it will act as both an introduction to the game world and a tutorial. So this is a strong contender for the near future.

But what I think I need right now is something much smaller.

I'm still unsure of my tech stack so I need something I can use to evaluate my options, and if I find a small enough concept that I enjoy, I might try implementing it in more than one of my options and see which workflow and result I like better.

So, back to the drawing board for now.

Next post will be about tech stack options and considerations!