The story of Silt
So a few weeks ago I made a game!
It's pretty good, if I say so myself.
If you're interested, here's the updates I made as it happened
Let's tell the story of it's creation first. Back when #7dfps was being discussed on Twitter, I had the idea. As I do when I get an idea for a game, I put it down on a Google Doc called "Terrible Game Ideas". Someday I should write a blog post about how great having such a list is. The idea sprang pretty much fully formed into my head back then. Let's see what I wrote, hey?
underwater FPS.bubbles rise constantly, unless you hold the "hold breath" button.go up/down too fast and you get the bendsget near the surface, and you get machinegunned from the boats circling above.getting shot in the tank jets you away, makes you lose all your airair gauge - breathe heavier, have less time alive.harpoons. slow reload, little ammo. slow travellingstealth.multiplayershit.little/no soundclouds of silt kicked up from the surface
Not all of that made it in, but that that didn't are still good ideas that would fit into the game.
So. I was excited as anything for 7DFPS to start. I deliberately marked it off on my calendar and didn't make plans all week. When the weekend rolled round, I got cracking as soon as the clock ticked past 1am.
The game unfortunately needed netcode written, as well as some custom modelling done. I had not done either of these before. So I was unsure what I would manage to get done. So I dug around and started off getting this Photon Bootcamp Demo. I took it, and I just started ripping bits out, left right and center. Until I was left with the very least that still did networking. And the terrain. FUN FACT: The plants in Silt are the same as the plants in the Bootcamp scene, just recoloured. Same positions, same everything. This approach paid off pretty well -- I feel like I can now deal with netcode from scratch, and I managed to make a game without ever falling too deep down a rabbit hole of tech issues. A basic scene with all this stuff setup would still be totally useful -- I know there's a whole bunch of useless state being synced across with this build.
So Saturday I got some stuff done, Sunday I spent a lot of time fucking about avoiding working on it, but I remember thinking I'd have something basically feature complete by the end of Tuesday. Which I more or less did. All this week , I've been staying up til like 2 or 3 am, which it turns out makes you incredibly tired if you're also waking up in the morning to go to work. I hate caffeine, so I was being powered by orange juice. Sugar rushes ahoy.
I think it was Sunday I first played it with someone else -- and even at that point a fun thing happened -- Alice tried to shoot me, missed, and from that I noticed she was coming at me, so I managed to shoot her. Simple, but neat, and nothing I had explicitly planned for. Which is ace!
Wednesday's first playtesting revealed a whole bunch of balance issues that make the game a different one to the one I wanted. Basically, as a result I slowed the whole thing right the fuck down -- halving movement speeds, doubling reload times on harpoons. So I fixed those up, and playested it with people from the net -- this time almost all the feedback I got was about howshonky the chat system (which I hadn't touched at all) was awful and required firing harpoons to send messages. Plus, people saying it was cool, which is always nice.
By Thursday I was basically too tired to work properly on it, so I coloured in the plants, fixed up a few bugs, and packaged it up and put it on the net.
Member discussion