Let’s make a simple video game!

The idea is a top-down, arcade style game where you try to survive as long as you can and gain points from dispatching enemies.

My inspiration loosely comes from this game called Devil Daggers.

In Devil Daggers, The player is contained in a circular area and tries to survive against waves of demonic creatures by shooting and dodging. The longer you survive, the more creatures appear and the more dangerous they get.

How can we take those foundations into a two dimensional arena?

In devil daggers you shoot magical daggers from your hand. Why not try something different and have a sword? In addition, let’s have the sword follow the direction of the mouse or right stick, like a twin stick shooter, but with a sword.

The arena in Devil Daggers is like an island so let’s do a literal tropical island. The low-level enemies could be crabs and seagulls to start out and after that there could be pirates or sea serpents or giant squid. The sky’s the limit.

Carving out an MVP

Minimum Viable Product is a strategy that makes starting a complex project much more reasonable. You lay out what the basic functionality would need to be in order to have a playable game, build an implementation, then test it out to see where to go from there.

Basic gameplay elements needed:

• Player character
  • Move character
  • Swing sword
  • Take damage
• Crab enemies
  • Move towards player
  • Deal damage to player on contact
  • Take damage and perish
• Island (arena)
  • Limit player at edge
  • Spawn crabs
• Game ends when player takes too much damage

Planning an MVP gives a short list of goals to tackle, which will help me stay on task.

That’s it for the planning phase, next time we’ll get our hands dirty and start creating the game elements!