I’m kind of doing two things at once in Unity at the moment… A. Teaching myself the basic mechanics (plus whatever random stuff I come up with) needed to create 2D platformers and B. Teaching myself specific mechanics needed to create specific things that I have in my design document for a very specific game that I want to make. These two things often overlap, but not always.
Yes, I do have a design document. But it’s still fairly barebones, and has a lot of vague ideas in it. My logic at the time of creating it was… why get too specific before I figure out what I’m even capable of? So I came up with a concept that I believe is highly scalable, and decided to focus on getting the most basic version working before adding a bunch of bells and whistles. But, minor pitfalls aside, I’m finding that I’m capable of quite a lot, so now I’m starting to think about the bells and whistles more.
I’m not going to get too deep into my design here yet, I’d rather wait until I have stuff to show… which will probably be soon enough. Soonish enough. But I will say that something at the core of my design is “choice” through, for lack of a better term, “collectibles”, yet I didn’t have the clearest idea of how exactly the collectibles would be worked into the moment to moment gameplay. However, while messing around with “A” above, I stumbled upon something that I thought would be relevant to my “B”, and that kind of instantly opened up a whole new mindset regarding collectibles that feels like it has near-endless potential… as much as my creative mind can come up with, anyway. I still need to work out the details and build a lot of specific mechanics surrounding this approach. But I feel like I’m on the right path now, and my general game concept feels a bit more concrete.
Now that I’m thinking on this path, I’m also realizing how much inspiration I can pull from the Mario games, especially the newer ones and some of the more interesting things that they have done with coin collecting… including one the New Super Mario Bros. Wii / U coin battle mode… such an awesome mode…