Game concept

For my first game I wanted a very simple idea, so I wouldn't have to deal with complex mechanics, animations, rigging etc.

My goal was to have a working, finished game, not a breathtaking revolutionary multiplayer game I had no chance to manage; I had many big ideas in the past, but every time I got stuck after spending days and days on details, losing interest while complexity grew too much.

So, this time I decided to try and focus on the bigger plan first, and make it beautiful later.

My first idea was a simple top-down space shooter, maybe with the rotating capabilities of  the classic Asteroids.

After some days, I thought I could go even more simple, and make it a turn-based puzzle game. I decided for a hexagonal pattern grid, and I started prototyping it in Java.

Java is my daily bread at work, so it was the ideal choice for me to have something working in no time... and so it was. I created a fast graphic framework using base Swing and AWT functions, and after a few classes (and some thread concurrency struggle) I had the base on which building my mechanics.

Here's the naive look of my game prototype

So I created a ship (the blue triangle) that could travel through the grid and "discover" the gray cells around it turning them white.

The question was: "What's the goal of the game?". While thinking about it, I tested the game a few times to spot bugs, and while doing this I repeatedly discovered all cells in the grid, every time trying the fastest way to do it. This gave me an idea: what if the goal was the simplest thing to do, travel around the grid discovering all cells? Maybe the ship was a space explorer, and every level a sector to map.

That was it: I had found the main mechanic for my game, and this gave me some good variations to work on: one level could be about exploring the sector in less than a certain number of turns, or less than a fixed time, etc.

Obviously, to spice up the game I needed some disturbing elements, so came the enemies, resources collection, health... these are all solutions I'm still experimentig with, and everything could still change.

For example, my first idea was building a repair base and defense turrets in a strategic game fashion, but after some rethinking I went for a more fast paced style, replacing them with mines and direct repairing of the ship.

Next: more about levels and enemies!

Thanks for reading and game you next time.