September 12: My dream game (and a few more updates)

I've decided that, before I start re-learning game development using that new tutorial I mentioned in the last post, I REALLY want to fill out the rest of my dream game, Errorgrove Isle's, GDD (Game Design Document). Before, I basically just had 2 mostly-disorganized text documents filled with all of my ideas for the game, one for all the dialogue I came up with and the game's plot, and a second "main" one for everything else. Now, I actually have 6 seperate Google Docs for all of my ideas, all far more organized. One is my main GDD, the second is for all the game's dialogue, there's a third for all of the entries in the game's Guidebook menu (basically a tutorial menu), the fourth is a list of all the game's items, crops, perks, weapons, and spells (and associated info like stats, sell prices, descriptions, ect.), the fifth is for the game's "Mysteries" menu (a mechanic fairly blatantly inspired by Outer Wild's Ship Log), and the sixth is a list of all of the game's enemies and bosses (with things like a basic description of their design, description of their attacks, what they can drop, and more).

I'm still not entirely finished moving everything over to the Google Docs yet (I'm about 3/4ths done with the main text file as of the time of writing, though I did focus on finishing moving over everything in the dialogue file a week or so ago so that's all done. I also still need to re-word everything to be more descriptive which will take a while, as what I'm doing so far is literally copy-pasting text directly from that disorganized text document to whichever Google Doc is most appropriate while making things more organized).

As for what I've come up with about the game itself, I have quite a few ideas for characters, but still need to come up with names for most of them. So far I've just been using placeholder names for them like [Player Character] or [Antagonist] (I've been using square brackets to denote placeholder text that I'll need to change later so I can easilly run a find & replace on it later). There's two notable exceptions though. One's a huge spoiler for the game's meta elements, though, so I'm not going to say it quite yet. The other one is one of the main town NPCs, a powerful Axolotl mage named Maya Aquafin that is actually one of the most fleshed-out characters so far (not counting major or more plot-relevant characters like the player character).

To explain a bit more about Errorgrove Isle to give you a bit more of an idea of what I'm going for, it's going to be a 3D Platformer/Action RPG hybrid with Farming Sim, Life Sim, and "Metroidbrania" elements and have a focus on solving mysteries and exploration and also have quite a lot of "meta" elements too. Despite the Life Sim and Farming Sim elements, the game will lean far more on the "Action RPG & 3D Platformer" side, and have a suprisingly-large emphasis on combat, with fighting enemies being just as profitable as growing crops, and the game having a planned 10 dungeons and 9 boss fights (with one of the dungeons and it's associated boss being postgame content).

Some of the game's inspirations are Outer Wilds, Tunic, and Animal Well (the mystery and "Metroidbrania" elements), Animal Crossing (Life Sim elements and character designs), Stardew Valley (Farming Sim and Life Sim elements), The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker (artstyle), and even games like Shipwreck 64, Inscryption, and The Hex (meta elements, albeit with far less horror elements, they'll still be there, but I want the game to still be somewhat "cozy").

To be honest, I'm not going to be dissapointed if my games don't get popular. I'm actually going to be happy if even 10 or so people play Errorgrove Isle, as I honestly just want to make something that people will enjoy. Errorgrove Isle is going to entirely be a passion project for me, and I'm intending on updating the game quite a bit post-release to add in every idea I had that I needed to cut out of the main release to save development time and reduce scope. I actually have quite a few ideas for post-release updates, all of which being quite sizable. All of my games will be passion projects, and I'm even planning on making my first 5 or so games I make be completely free, and maybe even make all of my smaller games free too.

After making a few games to practice, once I feel like I can actually accomplish everything I want to do with Errorgrove Isle, that's when I'm going to actually start working on it proper. Before then, I'm probably going to try to make concept art of the game's characters and locations to try to improve my art skills and to give me a head start for when I actually do feel ready to work on Errorgrove Isle. I'll most likely post some of the concept art on this site (or on imgur or some other place) once I make some art that I actually feel is good enough to share.

Site Upates

I still want to update this site on the side, and I may start doing that after finishing Errorgrove Isle's GDD. I'll focus on the GDD for now, though, just to get it out of the way.

As for what I'll add to the site next, I want to fill out all of the "dead" & placeholder links around this site, likely starting with the "Links" and "About This Site" pages, and finishing the "About Me" page.

After that, I'll probably start writing the Computercraft Tutorials. I've moved onto another modpack, as the one I was playing before (FTB Skies) ended up getting a bit too laggy in endgame (which sucks, as I actually progressed very far and only had a bit left until the lag started to get unbearable). I'm playing a new modpack now (Project Architect 2), and it also has Computercraft, along with a couple of addons, but I'm unsure if it has every addon I want to cover. If it doesn't, I may end up just making my own modpack exclusively for writing my tutorials, adding only Computercraft, the addons I plan to cover, and a few QOL mods and decor mods that I can use the spruce up the areas I take screenshots in.

Anyway, that's what's been going on recently. My next post will likely be in another week or two.