Happy New year and all that.
I wanted to spend most of the holiday playing around in Unreal4 and getting to grips with Blueprinting. I got off to a bit of a slow start with the Engine taking longer than anticipated to get my head around.
Eventually I just stopped being impatient and sat through some tutorials and learnt the basics, enough so I could start doing some initial prototyping.
Ive had an idea for a small game in my head for a while now and took the holiday to quantify some of my thoughts down on paper and start concepting.
The video below is my initial prototype, Ill talk more about the blueprints I created in a different post and keep this one about game ideas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQUw2ue3nT8
The small game works as follows:
Towers generate oil over time which can be sold for cash.
Cash is used to build more towers and upgrade existing ones.
Small towers can only hold a small amount of oil, with that capacity increasing as the towers are upgraded.
Larger towers hold more oil and allow the player to develop faster.
The concept of oil generating over time and the player spending their resources to manage the development of the site, are some of the key concepts of my game proposal.
Gameplay of the actual concept will be a little more indepth than just clicking on the towers to harvest the oil, but this small prototype let me get down the basic game loop and learn a bit of dev along the way.
Trucks will enter and collect the oil eventually (replacing the players clicks) and provide an aditional tech tree that can be upgraded with cash.
Capacity I think will be the main thing, with the player wanting to buy bigger trucks which can hold and move more oil for cash. I imagine these larger trucks might move slower? Who knows.
Crude [Oil] but the GIF is a better example of the gameplay than I could explain with words.
Gameplay will be 2.5d and focus on base building and resource gathering.
My goal for this is to get the factory element of the game working with some basic animations and an initial art pass before moving onto PHASE2 which will make the game more of a tower defense deal but, that will come later.
This project I think will just be a nice learning exercise for me to get to grips with the new engine. Im not putting any time scales on stuff since I also want to blog about stuff thats happening at work so, this will just be an evenings thing I work on when I feel the urge.
I also did a bit of drawing:
The towers will be upgraded in various different ways. Height at the moment represents drilling speed, giving more oil over time.
The tanks on each concept can be purchased to increase each rigs max capacity.
Looking forward to modeling and animating these, if I make it that far.
Trucks will carry oil out of the facility and exchange it for cash money.
This is the first image I did for the concept in my notebook and the rest of it spawned from here.
The game isnt actually about oil, its about something else, but if I can nail the resource gathering and base building side of the game and call it the first iteration, then moving onto PHASE2 and revealing the main concept will be in theory, easy.
Going to continue working on this in my spare time so, dont know when there will be another massive post of content like this!
Hopefully one day soon.
Also thanks Ben for the antagonist suggestion:
Antagonist or PROtagonist?
TWIST mate.
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