Setting smaller goals for the game I'm working on

I've been on a life long journey of self improvement, that has had it's ups and downs. Recently I've found a lot of motivation, which happens from time to time for no apparent reason. Today I've been trying to find out why I often don't make as much progress as I wish, and someone suggested setting smaller goals.

For the longest time I've wanted to become a game developer, and I've always thought that in order to do that I'll first have to have make a game. Now I've made a few games years ago, but to me a Tetris clone is not considered a game, I just did that to learn after all so nobody has ever seen those games. Now that I think on it that was a waste, anyone can do that now with frameworks such as Unity and Unreal 4, but back then using Oger it took a little bit more work. Sure, it was not much more than what a student would do in a school, but with no teacher to evaluate it there is no grades, no poof, and in that sense it's wasted. And so is almost everything I've done since then.

So this self indulgent post is going to be about what I'm currently working on, even though it's far from a game yet. And I'll be asking you for suggestions on what can be my smaller goals on this journey. I think this could be helpful because I keep jumping back and forth between all the different parts of the game since I lack focus and get easily bored.

My game will take place in a futuristic city, and it's going to be a game which focuses heavily on story and puzzles. I do know what these games are not the big sellers like an FPS or other action based games, but it's the type of game I like playing myself so it's what I'm going with. It's not going be an open world game either, that would be too much, so it will focus on various smaller areas of the city. The main part of the game will take place in the protagonists luxury hideout.

Here are some picture of the hideout so far. It is only partially textured, and the mountain base only has a temporary texture to help me visualize, but otherwise the structure is more or less complete. This is the second time I make this building because I stupidly lost the file the last time, so remember to always back up your stuff.

That's it for the main area so far. As for the city which I've spent most of my time the last few weeks working on, it's pretty much just a view form the balcony at this point, no special locations yet. I've started out with a map of Sidney, which seemed like a good starting point, I might develop some story around that too. So far I've mostly done clean up work, but it's coming along so I'll show a few pictures of that too.

This is pretty much the view you get from the balcony from straight across the water, the main city skyline, just without the textures and lights and with floating objects. I've not found a good way to align the buildings to the terrain automatically so I'm doing that manually and it's taking a along time and is very boring. So if anyone has any tips on that I'd appreciate it. If it was just this skyline it wouldn't be so bad, but there is a lot in the other directions too, and I'm really looking forward to get to the texturing part so I can see what it will look like with lights and everything. To make it more lively there will be boats on the water, cars on the bridge and along the harbor, shuttle crafts in the air and trains going along the skyrail. All very low poly though and only meant to be seen from a distance.

I've also been doing some work on the sky, I want there to be a moon very close, one that looks habitable, a bit like the Mars I have on my profile but more alien. I've made a few versions of that, non of which I'm happy with it. I had a whole live stream where I made one version that you skip through if you'd like to see that.

Other than that I want this to be in VR since I think that's very cool and I have had a Vive for a long time now and it bothers me that there is a lack of quality games for it, at least of the type I like to play. My favorite so far is Obduction, unfortunately it has no native Linux version yet.

I'm use Linux for development, and that comes with a lot of it's own challenges. I actually ended up ditching Unreal 4 because it has no way of playing videos in-game on the Linux version of the engine. So now I'm trying Unity, which also has very poor support for playing video in-game on Linux, but at least there are a few formats that work there. I'm still not sure which Engine I'll go with since there are things about the direction Unity is going that bothers me a lot. Especially the part where it won't let you edit your your Blender materials in the engines editor. I also find it much more limiting than Unreal in other ways, so I might have to go back to Unreal and find another way to do the video part. This might have more to do with that I have a lot more experience learning Unreal than Unity though. What would be very cool would be to use Ogre, but unfortunately I'm not skilled enough to do that and I don't think it has support for Vulkan.

Anyway, here is a picture standing on the roof of the apartment looking out at the city running from inside Unity just as a test. Nothing fancy, everything is basically on a flat plane here and it's using the old version of the city so less super tall futurey buildings, no sky-rail either, but it helps to test just to get an overview.

I think I'll have to go back to using Unreal though as the Unity way of doing things is just not making a lot of sense to me. All my old Unreal stuff was was lost in the same crash where I lost the original apartment, game mechanics, inventory system, shaders. That 's what this post is supposed to be about, setting smaller goals, to not have to make a whole game before even telling people that you're working on it, because before you know it you've spent thousands of hours working on nothing.

If any of you are interested in this project, I would love to hear what you think, if you'd like to know more about the story, what part of it you think I should work on next (personally I feel like working on the aquarium, large shiny box in picture 3), know more about the gameplay, characters, and so on. Or if you're making your own game or have in the past, how did it go for you?