Nokandu- First Devlog

Nokandu is a 2D pixel RPG where you've crash-landed on a desert planet and must find other survivors to create a base. Find water, farm crops, salvage wreckage, and complete tasks for those you find to transform a small part of this planet into an oasis. This was my very very first game that I started back in 2020 when the pandemic hit. At the time I had just graduated college and was looking to get into real estate development but everything changed when the fire nation atta-- I mean when everyone went into quarantine. With a lot of time on my hands I decided I wanted to learn how to make games so I started watching youtube tutorials and working on this project side by side. 

When I started I had no coding experience so it was months and months of online tutorials. Slowly things were getting made but at the time I had no concept of scope-creep--a year on and I started to catch on. The art came easy enough-- I had studied architecture at college and there are lots of pixel art tutorials on the internet, but the coding was really rough for a long time. The music was really fun when it was flowing and sooooo frustrating when it wasn't, I was using my 2010 macbook at first and it kept changing all my midi instruments to drums every 30 minutes, drove me absolutely nuts. Back then there was so much I wanted to do that I was starting things left and right, finishing few of them, with no idea of where I was heading. After about a year I took some time off to refill my bank account as a building inspector, and when I returned I couldn't get myself to work on this project-- it had become a behemoth of tutorial code and a beginner's loose ends. Luckily I saw a game jam that encouraged working on old games and it looked too good to be true!

In order to get this game in any playable state I had to cut lots and build more. I already had some art for the characters and environment and a few basic systems (inventory, scene management, etc), lots of which I used in my last game jam game Autumn's Bounty (check it out), but there was no semblance of a game. I had to step back and figure out what would drive progress and I decided it would be the progression of a town/creation of an oasis. I loved the idea that you might watch your environment change and become more fertile as you play, which might in turn change the game slowly from a survival RPG into an ended country-life RPG. I overhauled my dialogue systems, animated new plants, drew up buildings, coded a goals/progress system, and put together a 7-minute song I could loop over everything. It was a bit of a shamble but I'm so glad I got what I did together-- but there are definitely still things I would like to add.

First on that list of things I would like to add in future versions is cooking: I was hoping to create lots of ingredients and scatter recipe cards across the world to be collected. Second is building interiors and NPC routines to add to depth of the world. Third is a player death condition--right now the death condition for the player is disabled but the plan is if you die you become a small drone and gather the resources to resuscitate your body. Fourth is skill trees, fifth is a dynamic town that feels like it shifts and grows as you play-- I know that's the whole point of the game right now (whoops) but I don't think it's where I would love it to be.

Moving forward, I hope to work on this but I'm really not sure if it will happen. I've been working alone since I started in 2020 and I think I'm at the end of my solo game dev road. It's been amazing having the time and space to create the games I want to but I'm really starting to feel the limits of my own workflow. I can't step back and look at my games objectively, I can't troubleshoot with someone else familiar with the project, I can't even work from home anymore, instead I go to a coffee shop each day to clear my head. Any game that takes longer than two weeks becomes too difficult to navigate on my own so moving forward, I'm hoping to collaborate! I don't know what that looks like yet but I'm excited to figure it out. Whether I make games with other indie developers and publish under BumblebeanGames (which I only made a few weeks ago), publish under a new name, join an indie studio, jump onto someone else's project or vice versa, join a large game studio, etc, my goal is to work with someone else, anyone else. Bonus goal: make some money- that should probably be the actual priority but....I'll worry about that next.

If you want to hear more about my process of making this game let me know, this is my first devlog ever and it definitely became more of a personal journal entry (I hope you didn't mind). I really hope you enjoyed any part of the game and if you want to share anything at all please do!