How do you learn when you don’t know what you don’t know?

It’s been an interesting experience doing hobby solo-dev thus far.

At this point the studio is able to afford development tools that might have been out of reach in prior years.

On-deck to eventually get access to are notably:
Substance Painter
Zbrush

Blender is fantastic, but it’s materials section is fiddly.

All of the learning for my ‘first’ game has filtered out into this general variety of options:

1) work along a little on development document
2) work a little on acquiring program familiarity (Blender, Gamemaker, Davincci Resolve, Ren’Py) as well as language familiarity (Python, C#)
3) Identify where assets would be a good investment (grease pencil brushes for blender, topology/mesh automators for frequently used textures ((example: ROCKIFY)) )
3) Work through Coloso classes for specialized skill sets and workflows (how to make a volume model, how to design effective UI/UX, designing compelling scenes for 3D and 2.5D)
4) Sketch a little (visual is a high bar that has been set in terms of what the dev is good at and thus it needs to show skills. )
5) Write a little (visualize pathing/concepts of what sort of story is going to be told)
6) Little bit of level design.


At this juncture the next goal is to create a mini-game document and a greybox version to get some of the most simple elements into place.

So, just for (1) playable and navigable scene, are all systems in place such as:

1) Calling the game into action and ending it.
2) Is there an avatar/sprite in place
3) Is there functional UI
4) Does the system allow for minimum interface for the player (moving, advancing dialogue, clicking an object, etc)
5) Can the player pick up an object, inspect the object, and put it in an inventory
6) Can the player open their Map

That’s the minimum viable product for this section.

Further down the line:

-ACCESSIBILITY OPTIONS. FIND ‘EM. USE ‘EM.
– If visual puzzles are part of the gameplay loop, look into alt-text for vision impaired players/also subtitles for hard of hearing players if there are audio cues.
– Content Notes

– Icon notification for:
New NPC dialogue Available
Items On Map after area is first explored,
Visual Cue for Items/Level where Interaction is Possible
Scene/Time Sensitive Choice is Presented
NPC Mood/Companion Status
Specific Objectives Noted

– Flow Chart showing branching routes.
– Mini-Games Intra-Game