I’d like to tell you the details about the very beginning of the development of our game: Rail Route – our train simulator I introduced in the previous post.

Game engine

Unity editor

After we had a basic idea what our game will be, we needed to decide the technical part of the things. We did some research and picked up the Unity framework as our game engine. C# is the language we mastered in no time (mainly because the similarities to Java) but Unity was a real struggle. We hate the video tutorials, they are so boring and slow. You need at least a week to watch one tutorial and you won’t learn more than: “You can add the game object either by clicking here or clicking there.” So rather than tutorial watching we spent some time with trials and errors and this hands on approach works much better for us.  We code more and use Unity less :).

Platform

The next question was the platform we are developing for. PC was a must, but we were thinking of a mobile device as well. However, the majority of the game industry in mobiles is built up around micro-transactions and we hate that fact.

We also think that mobile games are mostly just time killers for the boring moments on bus stops or in the bathroom, but our game will be more engaging and sophisticated hence worth enough to spend some quality time on PC.

So by the end we decided not to target mobiles as the mobile gaming did not match our game ideas.

Graphics

Will it be 2D or 3D? The train simulators we got inspired by are made in 2D and we find that style intriguing. Either of us doesn’t have much experience with graphics so we also felt it will be easier for us to stick to 2D. However, by the end, making cool and remarkable 2D graphics can be more demanding process so we know this will be our limitation. We’ll probably need to hire someone and we know it is going to be a hard decision how to outsource this task – either we pay  one time job with our money or let someone to join our team with profit share scheme. We know we want the railroad as scheme in 2D. But it must be much more arty than what we have now.

Graphics in the prototype

The prototype

We wanted to make a prototype as soon as possible to see whether we are on the right path or not. And it was a good thing. We took a feedback from our friends that helped us to define our game better and to see some flaws in the initial design. Michal will tell you about the prototype in the next post.