For most of my development career, which has been pretty long but not as fruitful as I hoped, I’ve been involved in making one sort of game genre: tycoons.
I do pretty ok off my main project, but I basically have all my eggs in one basket. I’d say I’m an average programmer, I’m not super advanced and I’ve never used the more orderly programming etiquette such as OOP, and I’d say I suck at making vehicles ground up. I’ve also never really worked with camera manipulation either.
I used to build, but my building style has definitely not progressed past the 2014/2015 level and at this point I just outsource my building, either from my developer friends or hiring different, third party contractors, something I’ve been doing since 2015.
Between 2017 and earlier this year, I fell off of constantly deving, but I’m trying to get back into it.
As I am slowly getting back into developing, I have a few. questions
1. What topics should I focus on?
For example, I’ve never created a vehicle from scratch (however I’ve worked and heavily edited numerous other open sourced systems), and I know for many games, OOP and vehicle creation are heavily intertwined. What resources on the Community section, developer site, etc. would be helpful for these and more?
2. What would some game genres/projects that would be useful to expand my skills on?
Right now, tycoons are my thing, but even then, that gets old. However, I’ve seen some newer tycoons come around, like this, where it’s like a Command and Conquer game, while still being a tycoon. Having AI soldiers/vehicles as a core part of my game would certainly be something I’d be interested in,
3. Building
Building was never really my thing, though I’m interested in this building style that games, such as simulators, use.
I’ve talked to some of my builder friends about this, and they said it’s a lot of blender stuff, and if not, a lot of tight rules on colors to use. What would be a good guide to follow when trying t follow this building style?
4. UI Design
When I think about UI, I like keeping it as simple as possible, like this.
What program is used to make that, and (pardon my assumption), is most of making things like that putting shapes together in programs like gimp?
5. Motivation
I’ve noticed it’s pretty hard to stay focused on projects, especially when you have a few ideas/games going and it’s obvious that one is doing better than the rest. Sometimes it’s hard to stay focused too. How do some of you guys just push through the thick and the thin?
Those are some questions I’ve asked a lot of people to varying degree of detail and content, but I always felt that the answers I got were never as straightforward or as detailed as my questions. I also hope that whatever arises from this topic is helpful to other users as well.
tl;dr: Trying to expand my development skills and knowledge, as I feel like it’s getting pretty dated and too focused on one or two games instead of constantly expanding and experimenting. I’ve listed a few things ranging from individual scripting topics like vehicle (predominately aircraft) creation to general questions about building.
