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New Project: Basilisk

 I've been working on a new project this month. It's a serial point and click adventure, set in a familiar universe. It's going to be a non-profit project, to stand as a showcase for everything I've leaned in game design and programming. The setting will help to make it more visible. 

This was a tactic I used with some success in the past, when I made a battletech fan game. The number of views and downloads for that game were roughly ten to twenty times higher than for any of the games which I made based on my own ideas and settings.

I'm going to be able to reuse a lot of assets I originally designed for a previous sci-fi project, so that should save some time. There are going to be new assets, and I've already made some of the characters. There's a story, with an arc which covers a whole season of mini episodes.

Godot is a great game engine for this kind of project. Very light weight and easy to use, but with a full set of features. Godot 4 will include an advanced navigation server, but Godot 3 already has some nice tools for A* and so on.

After some playing around with the tools though, I wasn't quite satisfied. There were a few things that didn't quite fit for me, so I wrote my own navigation mesh and camera handler. It actually uses multiple nav meshes, joined together. I can designate some of them as "closed", for example if they lead through a locked door, and so exclude them from the graph. They also have attached camera dummies, so that when the player steps onto a certain set of tiles, the camera will change to follow.

There will be some sections of the game where the player is tasked with flying around a game map, from location to location. Those sections have a working prototype, but still require that they be fleshed out properly. 

Generally though, I'm happy with how the project is rolling along. Learning more about Godot is great, and there are plenty of fun challenges. From writing new 2D GLSL shaders to practicing my hand at designing characters.

It's not the crew from the TV series, but I think these characters have a change to be quite interesting. And the dialog editor I designed should make it pretty easy to write their interactive scripts.

Finally, taking on the project as a set of small mini-episodes should make it easier to tackle in my spare time. In the past, I tried to make a whole, complete game in one go, and I always got bogged down by the huge scale of the task.
 

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Location: Daegu, South Korea

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