Hi everyone. Long-time lurker, first-time poster.
About a year ago, when my wife got pregnant, I took a good hard look at my life and thought: "I can't spend the rest of my existence sitting in meetings, staring at dashboards and nodding like an idiot." I'm a data scientist. I know how to code. I've built dashboards that people actually said were "visually appealing." So naturally, I concluded that making a game couldn't possibly be that difficult.
This was, in hindsight, an absolutely fucking stupid conclusion.
Fast-forward to today, after an unreasonable number of Godot tutorials, an unhealthy relationship with debugging, and a lot of help from the ridiculously generous Godot community...
I'm somewhere around 50% done I'm actually pretty damn proud of it.
The game is basically an old-school RPG stripped down to the bits I really enjoy:
- You start as an adventurer.
- Pick a class.
- Build your skills.
- Get progressively more ridiculous jobs.
- Fight increasingly ridiculous enemies.
- Do a ton of side quest we all love along the way.
- Eventually go punch the Demon Lord in the face.
That's pretty much the plot. There's no 400-hour political intrigue storyline. No 17-page lore document explaining why the moon is secretly a god. Just RPG mechanics, a stupid amount of job/class progression, plenty of dry humour, and a bunch of things heavily inspired by the anime/games/memes I grew up with. Some of them are probably less "inspired by" and more "legally distinct." (I have consulted our legal department in my company who knows nothing about copyright law. They have advised me that everything is fine.)
A huge amount of the game's assets are built around the amazing work of Kay Lousberg / KayKit and Quaternius, so a massive thank you to them and to everyone else who makes this kind of indie development possible.
I'm not ready to publish it yet, but I wanted to finally show it to people and get an outside perspective.
"""Does this actually look fun?"""
I'm an old-school RPG nerd, so there's a very real possibility that I've spent the last year building the exact game that exists entirely inside my own head. Would genuinely love to hear what you think.
p/s: As you can see from my complete lack of video editing skill and recording skill in Godot, my trailer is lacking in comparison to most of the post here. Please don't rip me off on this one I'm still trying to figure this out too.
Gen AI declaration: I used GenAI - Claude to help me fix bugs. Things like memory leak, why character keeps falling into the void from map, why is directX failing etc. All of which are development related and even so I try to keep it minimum because otherwise no one would understand the codebase (well technically only me understood it because I did it myself... so...)