Game Dev Roadmap For 2020

After a rather amazing past 12 months where I’ve managed to make 12 games (and release 11 of them), at the end of 2019 I’ve decided to take a break and explore some new game development horizons.

Aside from the usual promotional work for the released games, I’ve started to look into making games using Unity and C#. While probably most people start learning a language by writing a “Hello World” program, my first C# program was making NGettext library run in Unity :p

While learning the fundamentals of C#, I was also trying to get familiar with Unity features and got to say that the learning curve is quite steep! But I did manage to port the existing architecture I’ve used for making games with Cocos Creator and this involved using Zenject as the base. Zenject is a world of pain in itself 🙂

The goal was to produce my first 3D web game, which will be a puzzle, kind of like Laser Lab but with a fantasy/magic theme. Things went fairly well, but at some point I had to take as break as making 3D level design and creating custom 3D assets in Blender proved to be a bit of tall order 🙂

But, with all the obstacles, I hope to release this 3D puzzle later on in 2020. It would be a great step ahead, at it will serve as a base for two more 3D puzzles, and possibly…many other games.

With Blockets, Drople, Dododox, Dog And Ball Forever, I have decided to try a different approach to producing games. I would pick a couple of ideas that seem promising then make the art assets for all of them back to back. For me, switching between art and programming requires effort, so by making graphics for all of them in one go, I’ve tried to streamline a bit the process. As of such, in the past couple of weeks, I have produced graphics for 11 more games of various genres: hyper-casual arcade, physics puzzles and couple of pure puzzles. They are designed as 2D and 3D games and they will be implemented using my existing framework for Cocos Creator (2D) as well as the newly written framework for Unity.

So 12 new games(!) that I hope to develop until end of 2020! Oh, and Dog And Ball Forever, which I kind of postponed to release it, but definitely will be out there in the next couple of weeks. Later edit: Dog And Ball Forever has been released!

As for technical aspects I’d like to learn in 2020:

• get better at C# and read more through “C# 7.0 In A Nutshell”;
• get better at Unity, from a programmer stand-point;
• produce my first Unity 3D game and devise a workflow to fit my solo developer routine;
• get acquinted with 2D character IK and animation (DragonBones);
• produce a Cocos Creator game to use DragonBones animation and physics integration (it’s one of the very few topics in CC that I have had the chance to touch – yet).

Hope to see you around and please don’t forget to support my games by subscribing to Coil!