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Hello again! I realize nobody will read this until I actually go ahead and debut the game, but if anybody cares to look back on these, here they are! I have officially been working on this game for about four months. I’m actually impressed by how much I’ve been able to learn in this limited amount of time. Luckily I work an overnight position, so I’m able to have a lot of downtime I can dedicate towards learning and then implementing what I’ve learned. The only downside is that the more I learn, the more I’m going back to re-do or fix mistakes I’ve made. One step forward, two steps back!
Speaking of which, I initially built this game in Unity as an entirely 3D environment. For those who don’t know, Nancy Drew games are 2D First Person, meaning they’re essentially a complex jumble of still images. As I had started in 3D, and I had very little experience in Blender, I was determined since the beginning to keep it 3D. Unfortunately, however… I have decided to switch to 2D. I kept going back and forth about it, but I think overall it will be better optimized this way. Hopefully by not having an entire 3D scene, I’ll be able to keep the GB’s low while also being able to render beautiful scenes, like we were used to back in the old ND days. I think I’ll be able to do a lot more stuff with it, so I’m excited to make the change.
Like I said, one step forward, two steps back. It’s not the biggest inconvenience in the world, but it’s just another issue on my plate (just when I thought I was out of issues!).
Here are some screenshots, for kicks!
→ Early look at UI
→ Early character design in Reallusions Character Creator
→ Messing with the 3D world, before I made the change to 2D
Everything is subject to change!
My hope is that it’s very obvious to anybody reading this or interacting with any of my content (outside of the game itself) that I am a complete beginner, legitimately starting from scratch. The only “leg-up” I have is that I have a minor in graphic design, which means it’s been easier for me to use Adobe projects than the average Joe. With that being said, I really want to be able to put out information on how this type of game can be made by an average person with no prior experience. I have a full-time job that’s completely unrelated to game design, so if you are doing a random ass job but have a passion for this or have a story to tell, it’s absolutely possible you can make a game like this, too. I wanna share things in better detail, but I am still learning myself, so for now I want to just share what I would consider the ideal ‘workflow’ for an ND game:
→ Story Boarding
More than anything, the story is the absolute heart of any ND-inspired game. For me, I specifically had a story I wanted to share, which is the driving force behind everything else. However, I’m not a writer, and I had all these ideas that I needed to be able write down and connect back to eachother. What I used was Notion (which is the application this is all written on!), as I find it to be very organized while also having multiple ways to various types of data all in the same place. If you guys would like, I can make my game design notion template free for anyone that would like to use it. I have one giant game design page where I have access to my story boarding, financial breakdown, game mechanics, art & design, etc etc etc… The story boarding page is the one I use the most. In it I have an entire character breakdown which really delves into each character, same with locations and what can be found at each nook and cranny. I have scenes in the game broken down and detailed into five parts. I also have a tab for objectives, journal pages, inventory items, interacatbles, puzzles, variables, dialogue trees, etc, etc, etc. I’m only now realizing how much stuff I have on there, lol! There’s a lot of different tools available to you online that you can use to help with the actual writing process, but this is what I use. Personally, as far as script building, i have written everything in detail EXCEPT for dialogue. I’ve found that I ended up changing a lot of things when I actually got to working on it in the game, so it was better for me to do it on-the-fly.
→ Blender & 3D Modeling
If you are planning to build your game as a 2D point-and-click, a lot of your work will take place working in a 3D program. Personally, I like working on my iPad, so I’ve used both Shapr3D and Nomad Sculpt. Shapr3d is made more so for 3D printing but can be good for less detailed items, like walls, floors, etc. I’ve used Nomad Sculpt to build more detailed/texture heavy items. But really, the OG of 3D development is always going to be Blender. I kind of despise it because I find it a lot more intuitive to work on my iPad, but I digress. What I have ended up doing a lot of is building items in both Shapr3d and Nomad Sculpt and then moving it over into Blender. I’ve also downloaded free commercial use 3D objects and placed them into my scenes as well. I’ll also note, I’ve been able to do ALL of this on either my iPad (as mentioned) OR my $400 laptop. The trick to this is getting an exterior hard drive, which I’ve placed all my projects onto. It’s worked great so far, but sometimes can be a little slower than usual as the data has to go back and forth between the hard drive and my computer. I will likely end up rendering the final images on my PC when I get to it.
→ Unity & Adventure Creator
Once you have your still images, you can bring them into Unity. I will tell anybody who will listen about the Adventure Creator plug in that basically does all the coding work for you. The creator of it has a great tutorial about how to make a 2.5D game (2D game with a 3D world). You don’t have to use Unity or Adventure Creator, but I’ve found both of them to be the most beginner friendly. I know there are some similar plug ins for Unreal Engine, but I’m heavily biased.
→ Reallusion: Character Creator & IClone
You’ll, of course, need to have characters in your game. This is a whole other bag of worms that drives me insane. I personally used Reallusion’s Character Creator to create all of my characters. Reallusion is by far the most expensive, but I have to admit it works very well. There are other options (as well as making them yourself from scratch in Blender)- I’ve heard Daz3d is pretty good as well. I Like Reallusion because they fully rig the characters body, facial expressions and mouth. Similarly, connecting it into their iClone program is pretty easy. iClone is an animation program, which is honestly very easy to use once you get the hang out it. I’m sure there’s lots of other options out there, this is what’s worked for me.
→ Creating UI, Readables, etc.
A big thing you will find yourself spending a lot of time doing is making the UI, inventory items and interactable items (ie, a piece of paper you find under someone’s bed). Each of these items needs to be meticulously created and put into your project, just for the player to look at a flyer that took you 4 hours in real life to make for only 3 seconds. Sigh! As far as UI goes, I spent a lot of time looking at how other games utilize their UI. How does the player access the inventory? What about settings? How does dialogue look? Is it ugly? Is it intuitive? I’ve deleted and redone my UI so many times its not even funny- and I’ll probably redo it more and more in the coming months. If you are unfamiliar with graphic design, I would probably start in Canva (although I don’t imagine it’s great for creating UI), as it seems very user friendly for beginners and has lots and lots of templates. I personally use Figma, which is created specifically to build UI. There’s pros and cons to each. If you can/know how to use Adobe products, those are great as well and the industry standard.
Like I said, there’s a lot of different ways to go about making these games, and I’m sure many others have taken different paths. This is just what I’ve done and have found the easiest for me.
I hope to be able to publish this all soon (not the actual game, mind you!), it’s been fun interacting with people on the various ND subreddits and it’s soo cool seeing how many people within the community have wanted to make their own games as well. Hopefully I’m helping some of you out, and I would LOVE if anyone has any advice for me!! You can find me on instagram @freekygirlgames or I’ve created a reddit using the same user!! I’ll be going on vacation soon and will be taking some breaks for game development when both fable and GTA6 come out 😎 hehe see ya later alligators!!