Starting my Dream Game Dev Project

Lots of people want to build video games, and a significant chunk of those try and start with their perfect project. This was the case for me back in 2014. I had just graduated with a degree in Ancient History before getting a job as a project manager for a tech company in London. I had no idea about coding and was given a 45-minute lecture on C# so I could sound like I knew what I was doing. This sparked a realisation that I needed to learn to code.

After chatting with my two best friends who had studied Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, we decided that we should build our perfect game and use this as a way to learn/improve our coding. After 3 years of learning and building, switching from Unity to Unreal Engine 4, we realised that this project was beyond our skill. We had managed to get a very basic game working with multiplayer, but it had several major issues: it wasn't fun; the scope was too large; and when we tried to implement saving, we realised we were going blind to each new section. A little bit of research highlighted we had fallen into the typical trap, we should have been building small games before we ever attempted a major project.

Don't start with a dream or major project for the first few games. You need experience across the whole lifecycle of a project.

By 2017, I had gone back to uni and done an MSc in Archaeology, specialising in computational archaeology and predictive modelling. With 3 years of learning to code and an MSc, I got my first role as a full-time developer. During this time I built a handful of little projects but didn't release any of them, however, spending so much time coding meant that I was learning a lot at work and home. Now in 2023, I have gathered enough experience to try my hand at a large project again.

Pillars of State (working title) is a colony-sim with grand strategy combined, set in a procedurally generated ancient world. Think Ancient Greeks, Romans, Ancient Egyptians and more, meets Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld and Songs of Syx.

Generate a world populated with different cultures, city-states/poleis, geography, climate, and historical events. Select a city-state/polis as a "mother city", land to colonise, and supplies for your colonists. Once in the game, the main loop consists of 3 parts: Survive; Thrive; Expand.

Surviving is the first part. Build housing to shelter your people, farms and fishing zones to provide them with food, manufacturing for processing wood and mud bricks. Once your people can fend for themselves, it is time to make them thrive. Improve the manufacturing to collect and process better resources like marble/sandstone/limestone, build temples/education/tavernas, and provide luxury goods like olives/grapes/wines/food varieties. Once your people are happy, it's time to expand and become a powerhouse through trade, war or both. You can then settle more colonies or expand your settlement into neighbouring areas. Maybe it is even time for war against another state.

I will go into more detail in future posts, but if you have any comments or suggestions, I would love to hear them.