Android Unity Game Development Blog, Day 1: “Pagan Wars”

Hello and welcome to Naishtech’s game dev blog! My name is Andrew and I’ll be taking you through all the blood sweat and tears involved in creating a game for Android using Unity. Each day I will be reporting on what I achieved, what I learned and what the next goal is. So without further ado let’s get started.

What I achieved:

Today was concept day. I have a few ideas in my mind on various games I’d like to make, but the one I have decided to settle on is a multi player turn based strategy. The inspiration for this one comes from a game I used to play often on my Commodore Amiga 500 in the late 80s called “North & South”. I liked this game for a number of reasons:

• It was quick, meaning you could play a full game within an hour.
• It had single player and local multilayer modes.
• It was essentially 3 games in one. A “Risk-like” overview map mode where you would conquer areas, a “battle scene” mode where you could battle with individual units, and another “platformer like” bonus mode where you fought on top of a train (at least that’s how I remember it)

So my idea is to take a similar approach to North & South with:

• Online multiplayer
• A ladder system
• A fantasy theme

Now, we can all dream big, but us lowly indie developers need to start small.

The plan for tomorrow:

• Establish a MVP (minimal viable product). Even before I start browsing the Unity Store for cool assets, or punching out my first lines of code, I need to make sure I’m not wasting my time. So I need a few questions answered:
• Why am I even doing this?
• What’s the plan to get feedback on my idea?
• Will people even play it?

Here are my initial thoughts on those questions:

Why am I even doing this?

Well, two reasons (both selfish). Firstly, I love a challenge and I love learning. Recently I’ve been learning a bunch of C# at my day job, so why not challenge myself to arguably the most difficult programming profession - multilayer game development?

Secondly, I think I’d like to play a game like this. I take a 40 minute train ride to work, so it might be fun to play a game here or there.

What’s the plan to get feedback on my idea?

I’m thinking two things:

Try to get some feedback on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit). I’ve also joined a few discord channels so I’ll post it in there to see if there any interest.

I also thought I might write a press release, yes even before I start.

Will people even play it?

Well I’m hoping the above will give me some indication, either way I’ll most likely press ahead with it. As I mentioned, I’m doing this for myself, and hey, at least others might learn from my mistakes ☺

Oh and I’ve decided on the name, it’ll be called “Pagan Wars".