Introduction

Welcome, this is my first project "Oil_Rig". It's a card game heavily inspired by Inscryption and Buckshot Roulette. At least that's the initial direction in which the game is going.

This game will be developed with the Jai programming language and Raylib which is a very simple library for game development. I would have preferred to do all the underlying systems myself, but I don't have enough time for that. Realistically speaking I will spend anywhere between 8-15h per week on this project because I have quite a lot on my plate at this moment, so I have to focus on the most important aspects of the game.

Rough roadmap

At first all I'm going to do is answer questions and make sure I can handle every single aspect of the game I'm excited about. By this I really mean - building proofs of concept both in terms of game systems and assets of desired quality.

Once those questions are answered, I will know which direction the game will take and from there I will focus on building the most important parts and composing them into a playable demo which clearly demonstrates what the game is about. At this point game should be in a state where all I need to do is add more content, polish that content and fix bugs.

This demo, I will take to publishers and try to get a deal which will allow me to work on the game full-time. Even though it's totally viable for me to build this game in my spare time while funding it myself with my day job. If I work on it full-time it will obviously get done sooner and the resulting game will likely be of better quality, since I can easily outperform my tired self.

During this phase, when all I'm doing is adding more content and polish, I will need some help finding the players who may be interested in playing the game. Then after many days of hard work the game will come out on Steam and I will make enough money to buy a big yacht and a smaller yacht which can be parked within the big yacht. I'm obviously joking, I will only buy a big yacht and fire myself just to increase shareholder value for my own company of which I'm the only shareholder.

I estimate I will have a decent playable demo of the game ready 5 months from now (sometime in August). So if you are a publisher send your best deals to me 5 months from now to this e-mail address: publishing@puhomir.com. Just keep the big yacht in the picture please, it's very important.

First step

One of my core principles is that the most difficult questions must be answered first. It's very tempting to take the easy wins first, but the early energy spike should be used for more difficult things. For that reason, the first thing I will focus on is graphics and art direction.

Simply because graphics will be the most technically challenging thing to pull off and specifying the graphical style will allow me to define what kind of assets I will have to make. The goal is to create a scene which is of the level of quality that I'd expect from a finished game, or at least "demo ready" game.

This may sound a bit stupid to seasoned game developers, because you would typically want to figure out the gameplay first, before diving into style. But to me the graphical style is something all my game ideas share, so even if the gameplay of one idea sucks I will still use the same graphics for another idea.

On top of that, programming is my strongest skill, while 3D modeling, art and music are secondary. I don't expect I will have trouble implementing any ideas in code, but I may not be able to execute on art or music. Therefore, I must prove that my graphics are doable. When the graphics are defined I will also have a much easier time figuring out music, since the two heavily depend on each other.

The style which I'm aiming for is something similar to Inscryption (left) and Buckshot Roulette (right). While both games are excellent in their own ways, what they both excel at is presentation. The gameplay mechanics are not complex, but the way they are presented elevates their significance to the whole new level. When playing these games I feel as if everything is always on the line, my mind gets consumed by the game. This is something I want to emulate, and I believe art direction will do a lot of heavy lifting in this regard.

Game dev Jargon

I'm not a game developer and the only reason I can do this in the first place is because I've built many low-level systems which similarly to games are really complicated and have strict performance requirements. I have the technical skills and in many ways I'm overqualified for my current game project. However, since I'm not a game developer I do not know much of the game developer Jargon and as a consequence of that I will often explain things in a dumber way than you are used to.

So please accept my apologies for that. I will name things the way I feel makes the most sense to me and I will figure things out from first principles, like I always do.

Next: Oil Rig : Raylib - Setting up Raylib.