You start with an idea, but like always you run into the problem of making it a reality. Because that’s the hard part about making games, or anything else for that matter.
Rather than show you how to program, or run a tutorial on how to use the different platforms (they have plenty enough of these), I decide to write a continuum of posts around the design and learning process itself. Let’s start with step one.
Choosing the Platform
Platform is basically a program that is used to create games. You don’t need to just write code in bunch of text files. These tools can help with plenty of different things, making the whole process much easier.
I chose to use Godot, a relatively fresh platform. There aren’t that many big games produced with it. Dome Keeper seems to be one of the rare recent successes. But it is a fairly well established platform, it’s free to use, and there’s an active community behind it.
More improtantly, Godot tutorials are excellent. I’ve already read through them, and they teach you well enough that the underlying mechanisms of the platform become easy to understand. Which of course is a long way from mastering them.
That done, time for step two.
The First Problem – Hex Map
Getting this far only took lots of procastrination and one or two days reading tutorials. And deciding which sort of game to produce. Details on that are not important right now, let’s just start with a vague idea of turn-based wargame on a hex map.
Thinking about my little project, I think the most important and basic part to start with is the hex map. And before we start with the programming, let’s go through the idea of what we want:
- A hex map of different size
- Terrain features and types on the map
- Units that can move on the map
- Other factors like victory points, reinforcement hexes etc
Keep in mind that I’ve tried learing programming several times, and forgotten everything long since. So we really need to start with the basics. In this case, that means finding a tutorial to help us along. After a bit of browsing I ended up with this one:
Solution – Just Paint Things
As it turns out, since Godot is a game engine, it already has in-built tools or functions for creating a map. All you need to do is choose the right scene (again, to understand what that is you need to read Godot tutorials), assign the tiles and then paint the map.
This of course results in nothing else than a hexgrid with painted tiles. It’s in no way a game nor functional, but it is a start. You could in fact do the same with paint, though that’s where the journey would end. This way we can continue our progress next week.
What I Learned
Setting up a tilemap is really easy. But the tutorial isn’t done, as beyond me painting hexes blue, red and white, there is zero functionality. Next time we will check how to make things a bit more interactive.
At the same time, I need to figure out how to make this more dynamic. If I make a game with ten scenarios, do I want to hard code everything at this level? Or would it be better to read the information from a text file?
