I’ve been riding the motivation train the for the last few days now, and this morning, I put my third libGDX game under my belt. It’s definitely nothing special. A visual novel game called The Missing Homework. It’s only cutscenes and dialogue. But it’s giving me a good understanding of how I can start prototyping the adventure game I want to start.
It’s going to be a mostly-text adventure game with a UI and a map. Something simple but with features such as health, hunger, and stats. Maybe some rogue-like elements. I like randomness. I know it’s important to keep the scope small which is why I’m leaving graphics mostly out of it.
Something that’s held me back a lot on a lot of projects is using assets I don’t like. Most books and tutorials include programmer art that isn’t very aesthetically pleasing. This leads me to wanting to make my own assets and becoming overwhelmed at the number of sprites & tiles there are to make. Even for the most basic prototype.
I know I need to draw some UI stuff like icons, dialogue boxes and the map. And probably a few sprites for the player and NPCs. But I really want to have to draw as little as possible. I think making a text-based game will allow me to focus more on the programming side of things
One of my first finished projects was a text adventure game called Infected Restaurant Adventure and I think I’m gonna use that as a base to start from. I had plans on remaking it with libGDX but I’ll probably use it as more of an inspiration.
I’m excited to have reached a point in my libGDX learning where I feel like I can make a working prototype on my own. What’s even more exciting is that I can finally try my hand at writing some tutorials with an original project. Something I’ve wanted to do for a while now.
