Here we are!

After tinkering with the concept of this game in the past year or so, I finally have a first version of a prototype rolling.

A few years ago, I had the concept of this game but never really did anything with it. First, I did not have any clue how to make a game (despite working as a software developer) and I did not have a lot of time either.

But the idea kept coming back to me and I eventually learnt how to build games using Unity (thanks to this awesome course) which motivated me to start the development of this game. Movie Makers was born!

In the first prototype, I decided to implement three of the main systems:

• Building system
• Hiring system
• Movie production system

As you will see, the focus was definitely not on making cute assets or a beautiful UI. I wanted to have these systems laid down and modular to have a base to grow from. Don’t worry though, I have a special milestone to polish both the UI and the assets before the game is available for download.

Inspired by other tycoon games, the building and hiring system were pretty straightforward to implement. Employees can be fired using the Delete key and there is a (half-useful) debug screen showing the path peeps are taking. There are still few bugs here and there but, apart from the graphics, nothing terrible. 

The biggest issue that I faced was to come up with the movie production system: I really did not know where to start! So, I made a list of movie making articles, read and compiled them to make a step by step movie production guide.

Making the guide...

It helped tremendously to figure out where to go. To start, I decided to implement a very simple system. In this version, movie production consists of two steps: writing and shooting (more steps will be implemented later). As soon as a movie starts, all employees (or peeps as I like to call them) move to a random point on the map. Once the movie is released, all peeps are also released and keep wandering.

After these systems were implemented, I cleaned up the codebase, made it modular for future development and fixed some bugs. 

In the next version, I will implement a basic economy system and improve the building system.

Let me know what you’d like to see in this game in the comments!

Be safe!