As a first game, choose an idea that you can finish in a short time, within two months. During the development, you will learn a lot. If you want to learn the full process, you have to go through every aspect of the creation. In other words: you have to finish your game.
You might have big dreams, and you want to make the next big title. That’s totally ok. However, if you are serious about this dream, you give yourself time and opportunity to learn. Starting with a goal you actually can reach right now!
There are some genres and features you should avoid if you want to learn and improve, and ultimately finish your game. Some of these have technical difficulties, others are heavy in art resources. Let’s see which are these difficult genres and features.
5. 3D models that you make yourself
If you want to make and finish your first game within a few months, you really don’t have time to make all of your 3D models by yourself. This is absolutely true in case of realistic models. Even low-poly models can take half an hour or more to create. That’s a lot of time for this timescale.
Instead, you can browse through the Asset Store (or other sources) and find the model pack that you like. If you are making a stylized game, for example, take a look at our POLYEnvironment packages, it’s affordable and contains enough prefab to make a few levels with them.
4. Role-playing games
This game requires several skills to make. Each of them requires a massive amount of time. Because of this, it’s hard to finish within a few months.
First, you need a rule system that contains the rules for any or all of the followings: races, classes, stats, leveling progresses, monsters, abilities…etc. You have to plan it carefully.
Second, you will develop a story and dialogues. Ideally, you give multiple choices to the player. You might already see the complexity of this part, you need a strong storytelling skill and lots of time.
Third, you will actually develop the game, and if it’s your first game, you should focus on this part, but without the other two, you can’t make an RPG game.
3. Strategy Games (except tower defense)
Like in case of role-playing games strategy games are complex projects too. The design phase of this genre is quite time-consuming. Even if you already have a good idea on paper, it might won’t work as a game, and you have to tweak a lot during the development to keep the balance and the fun.
2. Advanced AI
You can have AI in your games, but it should be dumb. Anything besides AI patrolling and using the navmesh would be overkill for your first game. Good AI takes weeks to make, and that’s a lot of time compared to the total 2 months timescale.
1. Network Multiplayer
The big scope buster. Today’s everyone wants to make a multiplayer game. Playing with friends together is very rewarding, and implementing features that allow your players to connect with each other doesn’t really seems to be a big deal. Well, it is.
As a freelancer, I worked on several networking projects. I also started an MMORPG server for fun (I didn’t finish it, and I’ll never do for sure). As a software engineer, I really like to think about the different features of multiplayer games. However, I know from my experiences how much effort it needs to develop.
Honorable Mentions
This was the five difficult genres and features you shouldn’t make as your first game, but there are others that you might want to avoid. These ‘honorable’ mentions are:
- Procedural content
- Isometric or 2.5d perspective view.
- Virtual Reality
- Adventure games (because of storytelling)
- Puzzle games (because planning a puzzle)
