Hey there!
Just going to give a quick update on the stuff I've been up to this past month. So, I think this break from working on Bright Red Skies is going to be fairly long. There are just a bunch of gamedev related things I personally want to improve on, and really just want to take time to build a stronger base so building games will be easier. Like I said in the previous devlog, I wanted to improve on my knowledge of story-telling and build a good narrative, so I added two more books to the list of books read:
- Creating Character Arcs - K.M Weiland
- The Last Fifty Pages - James Scott Bell
As someone with mostly a technical background, I really feel like, "Creating Character Arcs", opened my mind on structuring character arcs. "The Last Fifty Pages" introduced me to some good concepts on creating compelling endings, which is important for a game with multiple endings.
Other than that I did venture off onto Youtube where I started to create video devlogs where I'm creating a much smaller game so that I can release my first solo project. So the project is a bullet hell game to be released on mobile. The game itself isn't necessarily my main goal, but instead learning different aspects of Unity that I can learn or improve on such as ECS, performance optimization, and communicating with the backend that contains user data.
Over the month, I decided to give it a bit of a facelift and change the theme of the game from police officer cleaning up the streets, into something much weirder. So now the premise is that you're a redneck that gets transported into a video game world, so an isekai for the anime watchers out there. Using it to try and stand out more and allows it to make more sense when using a brighter color palette.
The last thing I did was to start learning how to implement multiplayer. I feel like this is a good general skill to learn, so tried my hand at it and made a prototype of a multiplayer game. You're separated into two teams, with the goal of getting to the other side. You can fire a bullet once every second and getting hit will respawn you back to your side of the screen. It's a simple game, where I'm just trying to test client to server communication.
Anyways, as I said before, this break from Bright Red Skies is most likely going to be a lengthy one. I feel like I really need to take this time to level up my game development skills. Hope you guys can understand. :)
I'll catch up with you next month with some more updates. Thanks to everyone joining in on this journey, I really appreciate it!