Bumblebee Games

When you hear about the development of many great and classic games, there's very often a part early on where a small team or just a single guy is sitting down to start working on a great ambitious idea, that has barely any resemblance to the game that actually saw release a few years later. The stories of finalizing the vision for Fallout or Halo are ridiculous. And I think I can now say that I have first hand experience with this part of game development. Project Wasp and Project Hornet are both great ideas. Games I would really love to see made and love to play. But as I am finding out, a good game concept is not just about being a game that you would enjoy, and having technical requirements that are within your capabilities. For a game with a strong narrative component, it also needs to be a concept where you have a good understanding of the themes that drive the experience and the subjects that the story is about, as well as plentiful ideas for game content that expresses these themes and subjects. The two concepts for gameplay mechanics for a fantasy RPG still feel really…

Still working on my game idea. But the deeper I've been diving into what work and skills it would take to make a 3D tactical RPG, the more I am thinking that this might be something that is outside my current means and not a realistic goal for a first attempt at making a game. A tile-based 2D tactical RPG I might be able to do, but acquiring the skills to draw sprites I'd be happy with seems like a major hurdle to take, and not one I'm looking forward to. A real-time with pause system in a 3D engine I also might be able to handle, but while I think that would be somewhat acceptable for my Sword & Sorcery setting Kaendor, it just wouldn't do for the kind of gunfights I want to see in my Space Opera setting Iridium Moons. And being able to reuse the same game code for an Iridium Moons game after completing a Kaendor game was the whole reason behind Project Hornet. So for the time being, I'm putting my concept work for Project Hornet into the desk drawer, to maybe see getting picked up again at some point in the future. (Though…

What a milestone. I now actually did game development in software rather than just pure concept work on paper. I created a color palette for the Hornet Engine. While I want to go with an overall naturalistic look for both Kaendor and Iridium Moons, I also want it to be slightly stylized. The visual style that I have in my mind combines relatively low polygon models for characters and environments while maintaining realistic proportions and colors that are bold but not too striking. It's a style that I think can look very evocative while at the same time letting you get away with fairly crude models and animations. Like in impressionist paintings, the color and the light and shadow do all the heavy lifting, while shapes and outlines can be mere suggestions of the actual thing. I really like the look of Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics, and the 15 primary hues of this color palette are directly inspired by it. It might look a bit cartoony any overly colorful for the kind of environments and creatures that make up my settings, but in the game all textures will be affected by shaders and environmental lighting. The color palette above shows…

Well, this didn't go as planned. I had expected to have an internet connection in my new place within a week after moving in, but then the technician from the provider saw that for the connection type I ordered they would have to replace some ancient hardware on the building's cabling. A week after that they still did not have a date for the upgrade, and couldn't even tell me yet when they would do the scheduling for the upgrade with the landlord. So I did make use of my 14-day annulment right and made a contract with a different ISP that was able to set me up with a temporary mobile network connection within two days. But this was data limited and it took another two weeks to finally have the landline up and running. But now I'm fully back in business, one month later than planned. And long after my summer break had ended. But I do have two half-day workdays every week now, so that's something. I've not been doing any Blender practice for the last month and only a little work on game concept designs, but I do now have some new thoughts about implementing stealth…

Today is the start of my first weekend in my new place. It's also the start of my summer break. After which I'll be working only 35-hour weeks, giving me two additional afternoons off. (I actually started three weeks ago, but those free afternoons were all spend at hardware and furniture stores.) This has always been when I planned to properly start working on creating my own videogame for real. Today also happens to be Midsummer, so this seems like a really good time to officially declare starting work as Bumblebee Games and the development of the Hornet Engine. As far as I can appreciate things now, there's three main things that I will need to making the style of game that I have in mind. Designing RPG mechanics and gameplay, using Godot, and 3D modelling in Blender. Fortunately for me, the first one is something I am already very familiar and quite experienced with. I've been tinkering with and researching the inner workings of pen and paper RPGs and what makes them tick for the last 10 years, and I feel that combined with my experiences playing a lot of late 90s and early 2000s CRPGs, I am having…

It has now been three months since I started out with my decision to learn making videogames. Since it was clear from the start that little, if any, actual work with Godot would be done during peak season at work and while looking for a new apartment, the game currently existing only as a bunch of scribbled notes is still right on schedule. But moving into my new place is now planned for late June, and I'll be taking my summer break in July. After which I'll be going from a 48-hour work week to a 35-hour week. Very excited about finally taking a crack at learning the most fundamental basics of Godot. And then, eventually, getting to the point where I can start attempting a first prototype for an actual game. Though I have to say, I've already been having a blast for the last three months working on just a general concept for what kind of game I want to create, and how it's roughly going to look and play like. I very seriously considered for a long time making a small, first person, open-world RPG like Morrowind with strong influences from Thief and System Shock 2. But…