The Gecko King (Dev log) #1

4 min readOct 29, 2017

Yeah that’s the name of my new — well technically, my first — game. I’ve made too many prototypes.

This article is an extension of my thought process, I’m not a writer, I think, I write code and I appreciate art.

I’ve been wanting to make an “actual game” with beautiful art, a reasonably good story and good sound. Emphasis on the words in bold. I made a Game Design Document (GDD), got a friend to help me write the story (it’s a really good story) and I went ahead to hire an artist off Unity Connect. I still need a sound engineer, that search is still in progress. I’m also in need of an illustrator and an animator, I have a list of potential people I could hire, the mind is willing but the bank account isn’t… Oh well, last last I’ll ask Isma'il and Onyekachi to help my life.

The game

So, this is a pseudo-turn based puzzle game, I say pseudo because in real turn based games everyone gets a turn and you have to watch and wait, here when you make a move the game’s AI makes it’s move also. I say AI but it’s just decision trees with some random attributes on the leaf nodes, nothing too snazzy. I’ve actually been making this game for quite a while. It’s gone through many iterations and at one point I almost ditched the whole project and deleted the code based. Blame it on the A* algorithm, YES A*.

Inspiration

It’s heavily inspired by Lara Croft Go (I love this game 😍) and pipe games, yes pipe games, ridiculous right, that genre of games is dead, but, hey who cares?! The art of the game is inspired by many games I’ve played and the ones I see on twitter and on Pinterest. There’s no sound in the game yet but I’m thinking of something like Ori and The Blind Forest. I’d have used Ori’s art style but I’d have to sell my kidney to pay the artist 😢.

Progress and Gameplay

The player starts in one part of the levels and tries to get to the other part of the level in the shortest amount of moves… That kinda stuff. If the enemies catch your player avatar, game over. If you make too many moves, game over.

I’ve implemented the core logic of the game:

Player movement (animations and custom in-memory grid-based pathfinding logic)
Basic enemy logic for one enemy type (I hope to add two more enemy types later on)
Tile rotation and tile connection to recalculate possible paths for pathfinding
Level generation using JSON (cos JSON is cool 😏)

I’ve been prototyping level configuration and difficulty — thanks to Ikechi Michael I’ve been able to rapidly prototype my work and export the level configurations to properly formatted JSON.

Initial prototype

The first task was to figure out how to implement pathfinding that won’t take too much time, so I’d be able to test out my idea as fast as possible. I ended up using this plugin initially. All I had to do was hook up delegates here and subclass some base classes there, and I had my prototype.

The Gecko King (initial_prototype_path_finding_001)

After I had the concept done I removed the plugin and started the code from scratch. It took days of sleepless night, cursing and frowning and little moments of joy where I’d smirk at my own ingenuity… LOL.

I ended up with this

The Gecko King (initial_prototype_path_finding_002)

As you can see, the animation was still wobbly and ewwww. I later got a 3D artist/animator and he helped me make a 3D model plus reasonably good animation.

There’s still a lot of work to be done though. I still need to work on the game UI, environment and character art, write code to bind all the things together and test and test and test. I plan to add leaderboards and put all the social stuff in later, BABY STEPS. It’s my first serious game, so I want to do things well. In the past I’ve made too many prototypes that didn’t go really far. AT ALL!!!