The Beginning
Aug 5, 2023
What is ChompChomp?
ChompChomp is a fun, small game that I’m going to be working on for a while and detailing the process of making it here on this blog for fun. As you may have guess by the thumbnail it’s a game about sharks! I love the ocean and sharks, and one day I don’t even remember what I was doing, but the idea came to me.
I’d been wanting an idea for a relatively simple game a for a while, being a web dev I’ve really wanted to get into game dev for quite some time but it always felt like the right idea just never hit me. It was always either too ambitious for a first game, already made, or just not enough.
I remember having a lotta fun on agar.io back in the day, something about being able to consume something and grow larger, enough to consume other players was both satisfying and fun. Of course agar.io had it’s issues as all things do but as a casual thing for fun I’m a fan of that eat to grow mechanic. So I thought, why not do something similar but with sharks? And so ChompChomp was born! It’s going to have a bit more than simply eating to grow, but that’s the core mechanic.
It’s funny because on one hand, I want to keep some things secret but also I want to share the process of making this game. I think I will:
- use some sort of spoiler tag to hide some things for anyone who doesn’t want to see everything
- be vague about some things
- not show everything
Decisions
When Making the Game theres a lot of decisions to be made, I’ll try to document some of the big ones here and my thought process for them.
2D/3D & Art
So this is definitely going to be a 2D game, for two main reasons:
Art
I’m a big fan of pixel art, and I think this is a good opporunity to practice pixel art, it’s also a lot faster than 3D modeling and one of my biggest goals for this game is to not get bogged down in the details and really make steady progress. I love 3D modeling too honestly and the next game I make I plan to be a sort of hybrid 3D pixel art sorta style.
Complexity
3D games are quite a bit more complex than 2D because of the literal whole dimension added, and I just wanna keep things simple for this as I get accustomed to the other aspects of creating a game that I’m less familiar with. I’m fine with 3D things and not put off by the complexity, but I don’t want it to be my focus.
Engine
There’re quite a few game engines out there, and I’ve looked into the biggest ones quite a bit already both recently and in the past when I previously set out to make a game (but didn’t follow through with really).
Godot was really appealing to me for a few reasons that I’ll get into in a moment. Before that I’ll also explain my rationale for why I didn’t go with a few game engines I considered.
Unreal Engine
UE is definitely one of, if not the most impressive engines out there. It’s been used for all sorts of games and has a crazy amount of high profile titles under its belt. And while it’s definitely best at crazy realistic 3D games, UE can still be used for 2D games as well. My favorite example is Gensokyo Night Festival which is a 2D game made in UE that looks awesome, the effects are crazy good looking.
But UE als has a very steep learning curve, and while I am familiar with C++ and have used it in the past, I think UE is just overkill for what I want to do. I might use it one day though because it’s capabilities are truly appealing.
Unity
Unity is another very popular engine, and it’s also very capable. It’s also a bit more beginner friendly than UE with plenty of great tutorials and resources for learning it. It’s very capable and has been used for all sorts of games, and is a great choice. It was actually a close second for me but I ended up going with Godot. One thing that I think deterred me slightly even though it’s not a big deal is that Unity is commerical software and while I know the free version is fine for most things, I just like the idea of using FOSS software when I can.
GameMaker Studio 2
Known for making 2D games game maker studio was another engine I considered but ultimately decided to not use. It’s a great engine no doubt but I felt like given the price if I wanted a different engine I’d use Unity over it, while I have no doubt of it’s capabilities it also just didn’t seem exciting or too interesting to me.
Godot
I’ve just heard loads of good things about Godot, and played around with it a bit before and like it. I’ve also seen what it can do and it’s impressive. It’s also FOSS which I think is incredible and love to support on top of being pretty beginner friendly.
Godot can use either their own language GDScript or C#. While initially I was going to use C# as I’m a big fan of types it seems like it introduces some overhead, and I can imagine some unforseen issues with it. So I’m using GDScript which is a lot like Python.
Platform
This game is at minimum going to be for desktop Windows depening on how things go though I’d love to port it to other platforms as well though. Not sure of how that all works for the most part so for now the aim just Windows.
Price
This game will be completely and 100% free and in the future most of what I make will either be free or a few bucks. Instead of charging a lot for a game I’m much more keen to add fun optional cosmetics that people can get if they actually enjoy the game and/or want to support me.
Closing Thoughts
I’m quite excited for this. I’m a webdev but I’ve wanted to make a game for the longest, and haven’t been able to for various reasons, struggles with ADHD, lack of time, lack of ideas, and more. But I feel like I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can really do it. Goal is really just to make things simple and fun, that I can be proud of and hopefully enjoy with friends.
This website will serve as a record/log of my journey to seeing that goal through. I’m excited to see where it goes, and I hope you are too.