Robo Drop v0.3.2

Robo Drop is a personal experiment mostly: what does it take to build a “commercial” game solo?

For me, I’m thinking of a game that’s ready for a public audience, has some polish, has complete features and can even be enjoyed! But I’ve decided to try to do it solo while using the wonderful art assets I can find around the community at Itch.io. Always money well spent.

I’ve been dabbling in serious game dev for probably a year now, even starting my own hobby group a few months ago. But its pretty hard to rally online strangers to commit to monthly projects, no matter what I do to try to make it easy for them. I always expected there would be probably 2-3 of us who consistently participated and that’s turned out to be true for the group.

However, it’s also true that building a full-featured game (even a game with just a couple of features) is A LOT of work. A group of amateurs can do a lot over a long period of time, but a short project is a bit more challenging due to the collaborations. And understanding the various parts of game development is a lot o wrap one’s head around if you’re coming at it thinking “Ill just write a script for this project” or “Ill just add a song/sprite/some other piece of work” and expect the game will come out great. It can’t with these kinds of piecemeal efforts. A good game requires a good team of collaborators, not just contributors (of course there’s solo development, but I’m more thinking about hobbyist groups).

Unity and tools like it make it easy for solo devs and small teams to finish a product, but I’ve also noticed that its ease-of-use blurs the lines in terms of all the various tasks it takes to build a game. I think people expect that you can just throw things together with a few contributions here or there and no collab.

For example, even just saying “I will spend some time designing level layouts today” pretty much never turns out to be a day of just level design. I can’t avoid coding something and that’s because the tool intentionally blends the 2 tasks: scripting and scene design. So instead my workflow becomes 2 processes: building out feature prefabs and then once I have sufficient placeholder assets and prefabs, I can focus on actually drafting out playable levels. Imagine that being a collaboration with a few friendly strangers who only want to contribute, not hash out the details of how to go about designing the levels.

And that also highlights something I took for granted about game dev: because of the way tools like Unity are designed, you’re strongly encouraged to play test features pretty thoroughly before you even have a playable level. This is great for breaking down game designs into discrete tasks that are manageable. But I still find it challenging to focus on level design within the engine.

Currently I draft out levels with tools like LDTK or just whiteboards, identifying features, objects and placeholders I’ll need to begin drafting a playable level. Then I’ll get to work on those so that I can play test those features within the engine.

But that’s just some random thoughts I had has I sat down to draft up Robo Drop. I want to make a short and simple game about rebuilding a scarred, over-industrialized world. Part of the narrative is about recycling and repurposing the environmental elements and solving the puzzle of environmental restoration. The narrative is definitely bigger than the game itself :)