I've already started working on this project for about 4 month now. I can work on it for about 2 days a week, which is not much but that's better than nothing.
At first I didn't know anything about game design, so my first reaction was to buy some books on the subject and study. I also followed some classes in C++ with my collegue Fabrice Lete to get up to speed with the language.
I must say I've been very impressed so far by the book 'the art of game design' by Jesse Schell. I'm not yet finished but I'm starting to feel like game design is no longer black magic. I'm still not very confident in my choices but I feel at some point I might be able to anticipate and create mecanics and systems that might work.
A few month back I started writing down some pieces of the concept and I'm regularly updating them.
As I'm pretty confident about my art and technical skills, I decided to work on all the other aspects first, design and prototyping, and then iterate until I'm pleased with the result. I'll do the eye candy later.
I first chose to work on a Zaxxon type of game. The render would be 3d, but the gameplay would be on a 2d plane at two different altitudes.
The first step was to put together the project on the various platforms and develop the 'toy'. The 'toy' is the control of the main 'character', a small ship here, along with the camera. Again, with the 'implement and iterate until that feels good' attitude.
I'm using LUA as my main programming language, with some support from C++ for functions that are more CPU intensives. I'm of course using our engine FreshEngine.
As I plan to release the game on as many platforms as possible, I need some abstract way of representing the graphical resources so I can adapt to any GPU easily. More on that later.
That is all for this first post, I'll present the project in more detail in the next one.
