Ideas for creating your own video game

Table of contents:

• What you need to develop
• Where to start
• What to pay attention to

Facebook Instagram, Pinterest, and other social networks are the third, recently formed method of searching for ideas – the reassessment of content from non-gaming sources, in particular, social networks such as Facebook or Instagram. Videos that gain a lot of views can lead to interesting thoughts. For example, the idea of a game, the main goal of which is to carefully pour honey on a pancake without missing the edge. The first stage of the game will be to remove honey from the honeycomb. The second is in careful spreading on the confectionery. The third is decorating with fruits.

Or take, for example, a YouTube video with options for anboxing packages. You can go from the opposite and make a game about shopping packaging - place it correctly in a box, fill it with shavings, put instructions or an envelope, tape it up and send it.

Behind things that seem far from game design, there may be hidden phenomena that provide the process with a special appeal – which, in turn, can be rethought and reworked in the format of game mechanics.

What you need to develop

To develop a hyper-casual game, it is vital:

• Bright head and hands
• The necessary software is ideally Unity, which is maximally adapted to create hyper-casual games. This option is suitable even for novice developers trying their hand at the genre, and facilitates work on the project at all stages up to the release.
• In the case of working with 3D models – any editor, for example, Blender.

The development of game mechanics usually falls on the studio – with huge competition in the market, a successful project vitally needs original gameplay. Creating graphics for a hyper-casual game is not necessary: with a good idea, you can limit yourself to searching for ready-made assets, especially at the early stages of development. And the first prototypes are often assembled on "squares".

Where to start

Let's take as an example the idea already voiced above about a typewriter and marking. In this case, the development pipeline will look something like this:

• Download the asset of the machine or create it ourselves from simple geometric shapes;
• We write the code so that the machine moves in a straight line;
• Having completed all the preparatory work, we begin to work on the basic mechanics – the rendering of the markup. Since this is a key feature of the game, it will take most of the time. Examples of the implementation of similar mechanics, but in a different way, can be found on YouTube;
• game ui mobile.

To make it more interesting to play the prototype, you can make one level. In this game mechanics, the main task, for example, will be to accurately get the markings for the road into the template. The more accurately you draw the markup, the more points you will score.
When you have finished the basic game mechanics, it's time to let someone play the prototype – friends and acquaintances will come.
By and large, if the cycle described above worked, congratulations, you have made a game prototype. After that, the next phase of refinement comes: the selection of graphics, the polishing of gameplay "irregularities" and everything else, which, in principle, is an "additional body kit".

What to pay attention to

At the stage of transition from a ready-made prototype to completion, many developers may get carried away with extraneous aspects – inventing interfaces, developing stores, adding content, and so on. All this will turn out to be completely unnecessary if your basic mechanics "won't shoot" – it will turn out to be insufficiently exciting, insufficiently refined, insufficiently "sticky". In our example, a good refinement of the prototype will be the addition of physics – the bouncing of the car on bumps, the dust flying out from under the wheels, the effect of sprayed paint, and so on. This expands and enriches the player's experience – and therefore makes the game more interesting. In many ways, it is such details that make the project memorable, stand out from the masses.

By paying attention to the right details (and game development outsourcing, for instance) when finalizing the basic mechanics, you can significantly influence the reaction of the future audience. In our example, this can be achieved by adding some positive effects: if the paint falls evenly into the required area, then encouraging phrases appear on the screen (Amazing + 1). Of course, without annoying sounds and without overlapping the screen – in this case you will get the opposite effect.