RPG Project Development Suspended: I should have listened the most popular advice.

If you are a newbie independent video game developer and decide to take a look at what other developers have to recommend for newcomers on reddit, youtube, or various forums, you will almost certainly hear or read most frequently this tip: Start small.

Which is a simple, two word sentence, but it also has some ambiguity. How much exactly is "small" ? What most devs on the internet seem to mean by that, is "Start with a 2D game for mobiles". But at the same time at other threads, blogs, or videos you will find out that the majority of devs giving advice online also give a piece of advice contradicting this: "The mobile market is over-saturated with simplistic 2D games, and the chances of success are very low". So it you combine these two, the message you are getting seems to be: "Start your development career by making a game that will most probably fail". Interesting right ?

I will tell you what. Initially, I was thinking about making a 2D game myself too. I had started doing some programming on a 2D side-scroller, a mix of platforming and beat 'em up, set in a fantasy world. But I realized that at least for me, personally, it was harder to make good enough 2D art than passable 3D art. I made some sprites but getting shading / shadows right was too hard for me, plus painting each different frame for an animation was a tedious repetitive operation that involved considerable trial and error. But making a 3D model animate with bones and a timeline seems more intuitive to me. And as for the shadows, these are done automatically on a 3D environment by the lighting / rendering system. I'll be honest with you and say that I suck in pixel art. And considering how a 2D game must have a unique art-style to catch the attention nowdays, because otherwise it will get lost in the over-crowded 2D market, making a 2D game for me personally seemed like a lost cause. As for 3D art, well I can't have my 3D models look like those of modern AAA games. The amount of detail I can put ranges from PS2 / Xbox level up to PS3 / Xbox360. Which makes them look dated in comparison to modern AAA games, but I think can still be acceptable for an indie game. With these in mind I decided early on that the games I'll be making will have 3D graphics.

 A sprite I made a few years ago for an abandoned 2D 

side scroller, and a 3D model of a rat I made for my RPG.

Initially I dreamed of making a huge open-world, Western, Action RPG. It's my most favorite genre as I love fantasy settings. But after some time I realized that my first game couldn't possibly be the RPG that would redefine the genre as I envisioned it. Something like that would be too much for me, a solo dev. So I decided to cut down stuff and still make an RPG, but with a number of features cut off. I thought I could do that in a timely manner. So, following some advice I read online, I decided to code the gameplay systems first, and move on to creating content such as graphics, quests, and environments later. The advice said that to make levels good you have to have a clear idea of knowing the game's mechanics, how the gameplay plays, so the levels can take advantage of them. So my first phase of game development would be coding all the systems first, and then build content around them. Back when I started the development of the 3D RPG project I estimated it would take me about 6 months to complete this phase, and about 18 more months to build the necessary content around it. So I estimated a total of 2 years development time required. Time passed, and I completed a whole year working on this game, and I still had not completed this phase. I was out of schedule considerably. I had already spent double the time of my initial estimation on this phase, and I still had not completed it. Realizing how far off my initial estimation for the first phase was, I re-estimated the amount of time for the content creation phase, and I added a conservative +50% of time required at that phase. So with the new estimations, the game would take me at least 4 years of work, if not more. That was too much. Almost immediately I also had another thought: "I've spent a year of heavy work only to make the minimum required mechanics for the genre work as they should, but if I had just picked a more simple video game genre, perhaps I could be applying the finishing touches on my first game by now". And that would be awesome. Because it would boost my confidence, and hopefully it would bring in some money so I can live with less worries, and have some budget for the next, larger, game.

 The empty, flat world of the RPG I've been working on
 for a whole year...

I took a radical decision at that point. To suspend the development of the RPG project for later, and start working from scratch in a new game, this time one that falls in a way less complicated genre. The RPG game won't be canceled. I have already invested so much time in making all these RPG game mechanics work, that it would be foolish to throw them away. But I just put the RPG aside, and focus on making a simpler kind of game now. So I decided to make a FPS, as FPSs are my second favorite genre after RPGs. And more specifically to an "old school" fps, with fast movement, medkits, etc. like the original Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, and Serious Sam. I've been working on the FPS game for 8 days, and I'm surprised by how fast I'm progressing. In the first week of developing my first FPS game, I've already written the necessary code so:

1. The player can move around and walk, sprint, crouch and jump.
2. There is a functional gun that shoots bullets, reloads, etc.
3. There is basic enemy AI that attacks the player if it sees him or hears his gunshots.
4. There are functional medkits, ammo and gun pickups.
5. There is functional but unpolished GUI reporting player health, stamina, ammo.

And in the 8th day I've also written the code necessary for the player to cycle through weapons with the mouse wheel, and to open and close doors, including locked doors that require a key. The most important and core mechanics of the game are already functional and just need some fine tuning. I could make a game just with these, but I'll be adding some extra stuff like secret areas and hidden collectibles, to encourage exploration as the 90s FPSs did. Given how fast the development of the FPS game is progressing, I'm now estimating that in a month since I started its development I will have all the gameplay mechanics, but also systems like saving, options menus etc, done. In fact it might take even less than this, because I've already written functional code for similar systems for my RPG game, that with some small changes I can transfer to the FPS game and have them working in less time than it would take to recode them from scratch.

 Early prototype screenshot of the FPS game, using 

placeholder graphics to test out game mechanics.

The cylinder on the left is a shotgun pickup, the small

rectangular box on its right a pistol, the two next boxes

ammo and medkit pickups, and on the far right a door.

Behind the mountains is also an enemy. All these are

functional in the first week.

Compare the time necessary to code the basic systems of a 3D Action RPG with the time necessary to do the same for a FPS. The difference is almost 1/12. And that is only for making the mechanics themselves work, not the content. So for the RPG project you would also have to code in each different quest, and if you want quests with multiple dialogue choices that affect the story outcome, then the amount of coding needed is several orders of magnitude higher than just making quests that always end in a single way. But FPS games don't have quests. At least most of them, the standard FPSs. Sure there are hybrids like the Far Cry series, but these are exceptions that diverge from the main FPS experience. That's not bad, I enjoy series like this quite much myself, but I also enjoy the traditional fast-paced action FPSs like those from the 90s. In fact the very reason that old-school FPSs are coming out less frequently than the other FPSs, have made me enjoy each release of old-school FPSs more than modern FPSs. I don't know if its the gameplay formula itself, nostalgia, or simply the fact that this kind of games come out less frequently that make me feel something special when I play them, but I do. It certainly is a good idea for me, a person who wants to make his first game to start with a simpler kind of game, but what I just explained previously about how I feel for old school FPSs further solidifies my decision to make this kind of game.

So these are my latest news and thoughts regarding my game development adventures. I've suspended the development of the game I wanted to make initially to work on another simpler, smaller game. But I'm not sad about this. Of course I didn't liked the fact that I had to leave a project aside, but I'm also trying to be pragmatic. Seeing how the FPS project moves faster than the RPG, I hope that I'll manage to have a FPS game made in a timely manner, in less time than it would take me to finish the RPG I have already spend a year working on. And perhaps it might sell well, and offer me the funds so I can then invest on higher production values for the RPG game, and maybe hire a few people to deal with the colossal amount work a RPG needs. Wish me good luck!