GameDevlog 0: Starting Somewhere

Overview

The game draws inspiration from a few disparate sources

À la BoTW, or Minecraft

The concept of using time as not only a resource but as a currency of sorts is directly inspired from the 2011 sci-film film In Time

Specifically Super Smash Brothers Melee. Fun and intuitive to use as a beginner and/or a casual player, but a nearly limitless skill ceiling that enables fast and rewarding movement and gameplay options.

Games like slither.io, where dying and starting over (at least partially) is a built-in part of the gameplay loop

Yes, I realize there is inherent tension between some of these sources- my hope is that the tension is productive in creating unique gameplay loops and forcing interesting design decisions. Each of those potentially interesting design decisions also represents fresh opportunities to shoot myself in the foot here, so I’m not quitting my day job.

Hex stuff

The single best resource on hexagons and hexagonal grids is the blog from Red Blob Games, aka The Hexagon Bible

Hex Grid Toolkit

Since the underlying formulas for working with hexagonal grids are consistent and solved (see above) there isn’t a lot of room for creativity or problem solving here, so I went with a pre-built asset to give me something to work with. After testing out two assets, I went with the Hex Grid Toolkit, which is a fairly un-opinionated library of hex-related functions.

This made it easier to jump into learning the Unreal Engine environment by having something with which to play around.

Engine

Reasons for using Unreal

• Mostly just wanting to try something different than Unity
• For visual scripting, Blueprints is native to Unreal whereas Bolt is tacked onto Unity
• For traditional scripting, I’ve worked a little with C# in the past with Unity and I think picking up a little C++ sounds fun