Hi I'm aoiti!
A couple years ago, I have been working to develop educational simulations and sharing the process on YT. Later I received a request to show making of A* algorithm for games. That started off the whole project.
One of my fav games is Imperialism. and I thought it wud be perfect to recreate, and share the process. From the planning to coding...
In Imperial Ambitions you can discover and colonize the world, allocate your labor force, monopolize markets, gight tactical battles and try to survive the age of imperialism...
I wanted to make the players more immersed in the world, but quite hard in strategy games, bec you look everything from the top. So I figured, making individuals representing the groups of soceity, making classifying them as we do, cud create that immersion better. Now you can follow the story of a character, when they were recruited, who they fought, what is their social status, ideologies, and more.
Ofcourse this is completely experimental, because each character is both representation of a group, and an individual. This has never been done before, and likely to explode somewhere, but I can take the risk. I want to take the risk.
Development has been a looooong process. Lucky I didnt need to earn from this project. I think, works created under pressure is rarely great.
I have been in development for a long time, but only as hobby. I tried some other engines, but decided to land on Unity for its community. Imho, that is key when you are new to developing. And I loved C# as I learned more. I think microsoft did a great work there.
The biggest challenge I had was probably Save N Load system. Because unity doesn't have a good serialization system. If you do not write the code saving and loading in mind, the Save and Load problem gets bigger exponentially with more code you have... It turns out, I needed to isolate the serialializable part of each entity into a seperate monobehaviour. This way, not everything had to be saved, only important parts.
Another issue with save N Load system was that I had several ScriptableObjects. Unity references ScriptableObjects using a unique ID...but the unique ID is refreshed everytime you start the Unity...which means I cud not save, restart the game and load again. All the references would be lost. Soooo... I manage to set my own unique ID system. I careated an indexing system, this contained a unique ID for every scriptable object and would not reset everytime Unity restarts... oh maaan this took ages to solve...
but did the challenges finish? No... My next challange is still awaiting... I need to better the artificial intelligence. I am thinking about developing seperate AI for the agents, and the computer factions. We'll see how it will go.
You wont like it...
I would say; Be realistic, do not expect to earn money first 4-5 year of your journey. If they just wanna make games for fun, then they are in luck.
I would also add this, do not work hard, work smart. Do you need to create 100 individual items? create 5 of them, figure out your process steps, then write a code that automatizes it. Half of my code is written for the Editor, making the creation step easy. in other words, create tools for borng and routine processes.
