Devtober Day #1

Well, I say day 1, but technically day 2 since I'm writing this at 3 am (or even day 3, depending on when you started!). Still, better late than never I suppose.

Either way, this post marks day 1 of my foray into Devtober, a month-long challenge to work on a game (at least a little) every day for the duration of October. The longest I've ever worked on a game straight previously was during a week-long game jam, so about three times that will probably prove to be a bit challenging, to say the least.

For this event, I'll primarily be working on a game I've already made a demo for previously (during that week-long game jam I talked about), this time using what I learned from that game jam to improve upon the game's mechanics, as well as flesh it out more thoroughly than I was able to last time around. As for a quick rundown of what the game is and what it entails... 

"Voxelsmith" is a voxel-based blacksmithing game focused on player customization and the use of realistic blacksmithing techniques in order to craft weapons. 

Perhaps my biggest inspiration for this concept was Vintage Story, whose smithing system absolutely captivated me when I first saw it in action. In it, players melt metal ore to form ingots, which can then either be used with casts, or heated on a forge in order to manually smith with a hammer.  The smithing process works by physically pushing around voxels on an anvil, the end goal being to create the shape of whatever one is trying to craft. It was such an immersive experience, and  I eventually wondered what would happen if someone were to take that mechanic and turn it into its own game entirely?

And so, after a bit of idea expansion (as well as some shameless pruning of the Vintage Story forums for the original mechanic concepts and suggestions on how to improve its smithing system), Voxelsmith was born just in time for an upcoming game jam. Of course, trying to develop that many mechanics within the short span of a week proved to be a bit more than I could handle, thus resulting in the demo made for that game jam being a very buggy mess. Thankfully, however, I was able to learn a lot about how to design and structure the code needed for my main mechanics, as well as what I could have improved on next time.

And that brings us to now, a couple of months later and ready to give the idea another go. Most of today has just been housekeeping, such as setting up the project environments with Github. I also spent waaaay too much time modeling and coloring a forge in MagicaVoxel, so there's that too, I guess. At least it looks pretty cool. On top of that, I also gave my design documents one last good polish to make sure I didn't miss anything crucial. Tomorrow, I plan to start actually laying down the groundwork for the various scenes, as well as seeing what pieces of code I can salvage from the game jam demo to re-use here.

Anyway, that's about it for now, till tomorrow (or technically today!),

- Ian, Lunarium Works