A little long this time.
Well, it’s several years if you count starts and stops, but the final run started in January, 2025 and it is now March 2026 and I almost have a releasable game. Of course, the last 1% takes a huge percentage of the time for some reason….
Click to move Action RPG. I started with the Gamedev.tv RPG courses for unity (four course series), but have gone quite a bit beyond.
Some screenshots:
Opening screen
Opening scene
Chest is openable and contains pickups (that can’t be used yet because player starts maxed out).
Minimap: a top-down screenshot with icons added procedurally. Took some debugging to get that to work! The “1” means “area 1 of map”—some levels are big enough that helps.
Note the canine companion, who helps attack enemies.
Also, I modified the “Cabin” Synty Adventure asset in Blender to give it an interior. The doors are openable too.
First enemy…not very challenging though:
Note Highlight Pro Plus used to highlight those enemies aware of the player. Also note 3D cursor shows where on the ground you would move to. The enemy shows up as a red chevron on the minmap. The dog is a blue chevron. The player is the white wedge.
And for fun, I added a Grim Reaper to clean up dead bodies so they don’t continue to consume resources:
I know, mixture of polygon and sidekick assets, so medium-poly and low-poly together. Hope it’s not too jarring!
Ridable boats:
fully automatic: just take you to a specific place. Make water splashing sounds and wood creaking, and bob a little in the water.
This is all the first level/scene of the game. There are currently 24 levels (2 of them secret levels easy to miss). Takes me about 5 hours to get through on Hard level. Levels have anywhere from 10 or so enemies to well over 100 in some larger levels. Some levels are modified (or even combined) sample scenes from Synty, some are built from the ground up.
Levels include: dungeons, day and night scenes, rain, snow and sunny (and desert) scenes, viking levels, Roman empire, ancient Egypt, a place of eternal misery that bad people go to, a jungle, a Wizard University, some Elven realms, and others.
While players are (mostly) human, other characters include humans (including Romans, Egyptians, peasants, royalty, warriors, barbarians, witches and wizards, walking corpses and zombies and skeletons), dwarves, elves, giants, trolls, ghosts, goblins, fairies (not the “tooth” kind), golems (not Gollum, but the ancient Hebrew mythical being), and other monsters of various kinds.
More screenshots at: https://x.com/search?q=(%23screenshotsaturday)%20(from%3ADeplorableMoun1)&f=top
Some are obsolete as I had made changes.
There are some issues. E.g. I had switched back and forth between Unity’s AI Navigation and Aron Greenberg’s A* Pathfinding Pro, and ultimately went with the latter. But it still acts funny sometimes. I had to modify levels to reduce the number of times the situations came up, but occasionally a character still decided to take the long way around to get somewhere or, worse, go in circles a bit before heading out (simplifying the area where that happens helps un-confuse the algorithm).
Also, once in a while a character gets stuck (sometimes goes off mesh into a wall!) but I try to detect that and teleport it back to the nearest valid space. It hasn’t happened for a while, so maybe finally I’ve found all the edge cases.
Also, for the huge levels, they take time to load (never more than about 30 seconds on my machine, but still annoying. It used to be worse, but I modified the saving system significantly to put each saved-data-set for each level in its own directory so I didn’t have to load everything with a level).
I tried doing load/save in background, but gave up…too many things just don’t work in background in Unity’s systems, and you get race conditions!
Motivation issues
Others may be interested in this:
I took the courses on Finish It! and Indy Game Success Roadmap, which helped. I invented (rather, rediscovered) something else that surprisingly, to me, helped:
When I used to work in an office, I hated filling out the biweekly timesheet to prove I put in my 80 hours over two weeks. But…being my own boss, I MADE myself fill out a weekly timesheet.
Strangely enough, that helped motivate me! I felt guilty if I goofed off while “on the clock” even though the only person who would come down on me was….me! It actually worked, kept me going. I didn’t do 40 hours every week, though some weeks I did 60! Depends on my energy level and other activities (e.g. taking elderly parents to hospital, etc.). I guess this is like “family leave”. So, timesheets that only I read, for my own information, and it is quite a motivator!