I’ve had a lot of thoughts as to what my game might be, and I have some interesting ideas of cool gameplay mechanics. When approaching new projects (not just in game dev) I always have a general “feeling” of what I’m trying to build. I can’t always visualize or explain the feeling, but I’d be able to tell you if I saw it.

Over the past week in my evenings I’ve been looking at procedural generation in both Unity and Unreal - exploring the options available to me here. Unity’s DOTS stack is very interesting, but there are some holes in both my knowledge and their current implementation which make my goals challenging.

Today I decided to take a step back and try to discover what my game might “feel” like. I first started by hitting up Google and finding some inspiration in the theme of my game.

After I had a good idea, I started finding assets on the Unity store that might capture some of these feelings, and just throwing them together in a scene. Little care was taken here, this will ultimately be thrown away - but the exercise allows me to visualize my ideas, run around - and see if I like them in the real as much as I like them in my head. I call this the “Discovery” phase, and below is the results of today: