The Idea
I love idle games. I've been playing them for many years. For reference, an idle game otherwise known as an incremental game, is a genre of game that uses its primary feature of just idling, as the main driving factor to play the game. Usually, there is minimum or zero player interaction needed. The simplest example of a game like this would be Cookie Clicker. All you do is click a cookie and receive in-game currency, then buy upgrades with said currency that help you click the cookie more. And it exponentially keeps growing from there.
So what better way to start than to make a game from a genre that I'm already familiar with? And since I'm starting small, I decided to make a game for mobile, as I feel having a small project scale would make it easier to start.
The First Steps
Back in August, I made my first attempt to begin the journey of making a mobile game with zero experience. I found a random tutorial on YouTube on how to make an idle game in the Unity Game Engine. So I began developing.
At the start, I was able to add a button connected to a counter. And every time the button was clicked, you received +1 to your currency. The next addition was to make some upgrades to make the button clicking more efficient, as well as adding a way to spend the currency you earned (Not shown in picture above). But as I watched this tutorial, I realized it strayed from my original idea. So I thought to myself: What do I want to add next? An upgrade menu.
I accomplished this by finding a string of random tutorials and mashing them all together. Thus, I managed to add an upgrade button that changes the scene the player is viewing. Then a system that lets the player scroll up and down through upgrades. This also acted as the home for all of the upgrade buttons.
I won't lie, during the process of just making two scenes, some buttons, and a counter, Unity made this difficult at times. In retrospect, I think I chose too difficult of an engine to just randomly pick up. But regardless of the difficulty, I wasn't liking the workflow of working in Unity. I needed something easier to digest to help me understand core ideas and game systems.
The Switch
I started doing some research on what other game engines I could use. And that was when I discovered the Godot Game Engine. I figured I should give it a shot to see what it had to offer. Maybe I'd like it more than Unity.
*Note* I seem to have incredible timing switching from Unity over to Godot. Unity recently unveiled their new developer pricing plans and the community is in an uproar. Talk about perfect timing.
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