So, in my spare time I've been looking at turning a lot of my old idea mess into a workable product - the question is how and why.
After several failures pitching, rolling, stabbing and thumping the idea, I finally found something I'm happy with and started to toil to make that vision from concepts, rambling scripts, ideas scrawled on napkins into reality.
But the hard truth of game development is hard work. And what I'm doing is more a work of passion, than it is a monetary project. After enduring many failures... I'm quite happy to just to work on it as a long-term side project. The monetary angle perished a while back and I'm in favor of just making that vision a reality for its own sake.
So to top off a short ramble - I've some experience in game development - from mods that died from inanity, to projects that seemed on the verge of fruition, but vanished when the leader had IRL issues and never returned. Made lots of noise myself, succeeded in biting myself in the ass - and even headed my own project that went down in flames because I never set boundaries and treated it roughly, only to have a team revolt when the chief editor declared himself the new lead under the guise of group control. And that died horribadly and caused substantial anger among friends. Some of these were just bad luck, others were plainly my fault. And so I had to take a stack of failures and learn from it. For a while I tried modding here, then IRL issues went to hell because my family is quite literally off their rocker.
On the other hand, I feel its important to accept these failures and sometimes, better to flat out admit it than try to shove it in a corner. Life sucks, but failure is par for the course. We can't grow without understand and tasting the bitter dregs of defeat. And my experiences with some less than honest mobile devs made it worse; they seemed friendly and willing enough at first - that being they wanted to kickstart things without even fully having an idea to sell. I shut that down amidst a flurry of heated e-mails and name calling. And now I made some real enemies that I can stare in the eye and get a good chuckle from.
So to end the rambling, it's less about vision, and more the sober realities of what we hope to gain from it. From my own screw ups, screwballs, and dealing with stupid people I did learn one thing - it's the passion that drives us to create, the vision that pushes us to make, and the hard knocks of life to temper it to reasonable expectations.
So, rant off, reason cap on.
So the idea? Well, simply magical girls meets post-apocalyptic aerial combat with various types of aircraft, even including ground attack. The pitch? An strategy RPG with a rogue like mechanic and a mix of Visual Novel/Roleplaying elements. The aesthetic? A term I call RetroPoly - a mix of celshading, PS2 era graphics that focuses more on style and unity, than fidelity and throws the cinematic excuse under a bus loaded with C4.
The problem? The approach. What tools, format, and how to do it. What toolset, direction, and organization to figure it out. Afterall, I realize that I'm one idiot with a fool's errand. I'm not crying for a team, spewing for help, but mired in the problem of how to push it. And my intent is to run it as a "one man band" till I feel that I actually need to recruit others.
It's one thing to cry for a manifesto, talk about a purpose, but here I'm extolling a much different virtue - actually getting the damn thing off the ground. It's called actually making the plans and setting the creation in motion - and frankly I've been quite busy with a lot of asset development and digging out old ideas and breathing life into it. The chief mistake when first launching the project was chasing the vision, rather than letting that vision drive me. From an artist's perspective, the real pusher is the vision itself - an artist cannot operate without a vision to drive the proverbial car.
And yes, I'll actually start posting development material to show that I've actually been cracking like a beaver on it. Just had to get the manifesto done first
Edit: Forgot to add: what do you guys think makes a good plan to get development off the ground and actually into a tangible monster?
As promised, some images from the asset development:
