Project Hopefully I Will Learn Something (HIWLS) (Learning Project)

Game Engine Works in Progress and Game Demos
#1

Hello Everyone,

Here is another(;)) learning project I am starting called Project HIWLS. For this game, I have decided to break apart everything that is needed for a game and work on it one at a time. Here is how I am doing it.

  1. Planning - [Planning] [Design] [Concept art]

  2. Model - [Character(s)] [Stage(s)]

  3. Texture

  4. Rigging

  5. Animating - [Character/object animation] [Cutscene(s)]

  6. Logic/Physics/programming

  7. Music - [Sound effects] [Background Music]

  8. Effects - [Special Effects (such as particles)] [Lighting]

  9. Testing/Debugging

The stuff in [Brackets] are the broken steps broken down more… I guess. As you can see from my chart-ish looking thing, those are the steps I will take to complete a small game. You can also see that I will be learning about the basic things such as creating good concept art and making music.

I haven’t really started planning it out yet (which is the 1st thing on the list), but I know that the story will just be a human person who has to go through 4 small stages (Forest, Volcano, Beach, and Factory) and once he gets through them you win. There isn’t really much story at all, but this is just a learning project.

#2

O.K. so I have finished how I want the stages to be. Now I am going to do the concept art. It won’t be amazing, but this will hopefully improve my drawing skills.

#3

Hmmm… Ok I’m just gonna skip the concept art because this game is gonna be so small that I can’t think of anything to draw. I got all the ideas in my head. So I think I pretty much have most of the design and stuff ready, I will move on to the next step, modeling the main character.

#4

I highly recommend drawing absolutely everything out anyways, even if you think you know how you want it to look. That way you can show it to people and they can tell you what’s not working- and you should spend some time looking at it yourself to see if you’d change anything. That gives you a chance to fix any potential problems before you’ve gone and modeled and textured them.

#5

Captain Oblivion: If you think I should draw everything, then I will try.

I have a question, What is the best way to stay motivated to make a game? When I think about this game, I am all excited, but when I sit down at the computer and open blender, I become instantly bored. I think one reason why is because this game will be small, and not very exciting. Another thing, I think I will put modeling and texturing together since I would NOT want to go over an entire game and texture every model, I think I will just model then texture that model.

#6

It helps to be very organized; that way you know exactly what you need to do when you open up Blender. Plan out exactly which models you need (not just “I need some cars”, but “I need 3 different cars, they should be these three cars and here are my reference pictures”)

I know personally what keeps me from finishing projects is when I reach a point where I know I have a lot of work to do, but I spend more time figuring out what to do next than actually doing anything. Plan it all out before and you can just work. It really doesn’t matter if you do all your modeling, then all your texturing- or just texture each model as you finish them.