It’s been a while since I started working with Unity3d and try to learn the ways of videogame development. Honor & Glory was the name we came up with for this first project and even when we learned a lot the project was not fully successful. Why was that? I thought it would be a good idea to write a post to remember what we built that time and remember the learnings from our first project.

So… what’s the game about?

The H&G origin came from a weird mix of a couple other games (let’s call it inspiration). Those games would be Diablo, League of Legends, and probably some other game I don’t remember. The gameplay genre was going to be a 3rd person, top down camera, medieval arena battles game so pretty much an Diablo-like arena game.

Here’s a screenshot image of the result of our work:

Cool right?

We didn’t expect to get this far just in a couple of months. As you can see in the image we added some crazy features to it and I’m going to try list them all.

Most important features

• Different classes and player types (Warrior, Rogue and Mage)
• Vitals for the player: Health and mana bars
• Player animations for idle, walking, attack, die, etc.
• LAN multiplayer (using the built in basic unity network)
• Mini map with the position of the players and enemies

Which it’s a very interesting list considering it was our first game. But of course that’s when we learned one of those things about making games that we never thought it was part of the process: The gameplay is not the only part of the game. The main menu was not done, there was no way to save data, the character selection was not defined, etc.

So we came up with this main menu to start the game:

More learnings came with those changes. I guess the most interesting learning I can think of right now is that we learned how to jump between different scenes and keep data between them, so basically a basic global game state using Game Managers. With those learnings we also added the Character Selection screen and it looks kinda good.

Even with all those improvements the game didn’t feel complete and didn’t meet our own quality standards. And I guess here’s where we started to make some mistakes in scoping and planning.

Why wasn’t it finished?

We didn’t have any real experience and we had great expectations for the project. We wanted to make the next World of Warcraft or the next Skyrim with a small team and no budget, easy right? what could go wrong?

After figuring out what we wanted to do next we evolved the idea and it became something insanely great but impossible for a small team of 2 to build, so the recruiting started. We became a 7 people “team” but we still didn’t know exactly what we wanted. After a couple of months of disagreements and lack of resources we didn’t get very far and we disbanded.

Here’s a screenshot of the “new” arena level we were working on at the time.

Conclusion

We learned a lot, built a nice game and we fell down by our ambition. I’d say that was worth it. This was the start of our addiction on making games and even when sometimes we have stopped working on them we always come back to build the next game.

With this project is when I really found out the thrill that a well thought solution can feel like. I wanted to improve my coding skills and I would say that coding a game is challenge enough to build up my coding capabilities.