The Phae Project is a 3rd person action adventure game that I wanted to make for a very long time. It will be based in a fantasy world where the creatures called “phae” (the name might change) is in danger and you will need to save them from extinction by taking care of them. These creatures are magical and you will use them on your adventures to battle and find secrets.

The game will be inspired by a lot of games I loved, especially action JRPGs. I plan to have a lot of features like a free-look camera, level-streaming, action battles, boss battles, special abilities, pets (phae), dialogue, quests, cutscenes and more. I will be developing it on my own, which makes this ambitious project quite scary to tackle. Even though I wanted to make this game for a long time, I couldn’t start the project before because I thought that I lacked experience in game development. Even now I am still unsure if I have what it takes to complete such an ambitious project on my own. But I will never know until I try, and it is now or never since I won’t have the freedom of working from home forever.

Since I am a software engineer and not an artist there are many things that I will need to learn how to do during this journey: 2D, 3D, animating, music, ect. But even if I was both a good artist and a good software engineer it would be hard to develop a game with this scope, alone. That is why I decided to buy a few assets on the asset store to give me a little push and so that I can focus on the things that make my game diferent instead of reinventing the wheel. The main assets I bought for this project are: Third Person Controller and Behaviour Designer by Opsive, Dialogue System and Quest Machine by Pixel Crushers, Inventory Pro by Devdog and more. I will give my impression on all the assets that I will be using throughout the project.

My current plan is to have a prototype of the combat system and exploration by the end of the third month of development. I then plan to add to add the phae park where you take care of the creatures, make them evolve and make them compete in minigames by the end of month 6 of development, that will be the alpha build of the game. I will then take the next 6 months to complete the story mode. That means the first version of the Beta will be done by the end of the first year of development. The second year will be polishing, adding content, a lot of player testing and marketing.

Since I will make this game in my free time, I plan to work an average of around 20-30 hours per week depending on how much time I will be able to spare. I will try to log how many hours I work and I will use the dev log as a kind of diary of what I do each week. Hopefully I will be consistent enough so that there is enough content on which to write.

Starting with dev log 1: the first week.

I created a Unity project with the latest version 2018.3.0f2 because I wanted to take advantage of the nested prefabs. I also decided to go with the HD render pipeline (HDRP) because I plan to release the game only on PC and I want to have no limits on the type of shader and VFX I use. I plan to use the new Visual Effect Editor that can render particles using the GPU, which is only compatible with HDRP I then Imported all the assets and packages that I plan to use in the project and made sure there were no errors.

I created a character that has roughly the proportion of the main character in Blender. I gave him a simple humanoid bone structure. I then used two of the assets I bought to get it moving in Unity.

First Puppet 3D (P3D): it is a tool that helps you rig, skin and animate any mesh directly inside Unity. The tool is a bit knew and rough on the edges but after a bit of trial and error I was able to add controllers to my character by pressing a single button “Mod Rig” on the Puppet 3D window. It modifies a humanoid model to work with the animations of P3D. The cool thing is that you can modify an existing humanoid animation by blending the original animation with the P3D animation controlled by IK controllers. Each arm or leg and the body of the character can be blended independently, giving you a lot of freedom.

The second asset I used was the Third Person Controller (TPC) to create a character using my model. This asset feels a lot more professional and works very well. It is filled with content and will take weeks for me to learn everything it can do. For now it makes my character move around and jump. Most of the game will rely on the structure of TPC (movement, combat, enemies, ect) so I will take my time learning how to best make use of it and expand it if necessary.

I plan to share my ideas, my knowledge and whatever I learn throughout this journey. Hopefully my failures and successes will be useful to some of you. I will post these dev logs every Tuesday and as the project gets bigger I might start posting updates on more platforms (twitter, pinterest, patreon, etc).

Until next week!