A devlog is born!

I've worked on a bunch of smaller games with very short timelines mainly for game jams and hackathons.

"Scouts" is the first game that i'll be creating an MVP of that has a larger, slightly more ambitious scope than i'm used to.

For a bit of background, I've been making games as a hobbyist since circa 2011, Joined my first GGJ (Global Game Jam) in 2013, and have a bunch of pet projects scattered about the internet. I've been making games with my wife who does all the art and design under the label GomaGames, most of them can be seen (not all can be played) at https://www.gomagames.com

I'm a software engineer with an affinity towards the networking. Multiplayer games is a nice challenge and opens up lots of possibilities. You can play one of my earlier multiplayer browser/mobile games here with a friend http://dragons.gomagames.com and our first itch.io submission for a gamejam a few months ago is also multiplayer, and my first time using Godot engine https://gomagames.itch.io/pooped

Game design has been lacking, most of my previous games required (or desperately needed) much game design love. For this game "Scouts", i'm focusing much more on learning more about game design, which is why i'm also starting this devlog.

During the creation of this MVP I'll be posting the process, things i learned, and resources i've used to reference.
I'll also explain a few things along the way, such as "MVP", it means Minimal Viable Product, in gamedev terms is very similar to the idea of  "Thin Vertical Slice" where you build just the very basic minimal requirements needed for someone to play your game, and you can vet the idea faster before moving forward, or pivot if needed.

Initial idea

The idea of "Scouts" came from answering the question "What game do i want to play with my wife, and with my friends, who are not all hard core gamers". We like to play co-op games, time management games, and lots of tabletop (physical) games. Overcooked, Don't Starve Together to name a few.

First thoughts are to make a multiplayer camping survival and crafting game formatted for mobile browsers. Essentially Don't Starve Together except in a mobile browser and a shorter game experience where you simply craft a fence around your camp to survive creatures that steal your food through the night.

The rules are:

1. Every player must be able to eat food in the morning

2. The campfire must be lit by nightfall

3. If any tent is fully destroyed during the night, the game is over

Requirements

I chose Godot game engine because I had such a great experience building "Pooped". Godot is a solid engine with sane design choices and intuitive UX. GDScript is a decent language.

Nakama realtime multiplayer game server is really easy to use and has a fast embedded code runtime where I can write server side logic with Go and Lua, both of which I like working in. I'll do an overview of the setup in a future post.

For game content such as recipes and levels, I chose to use CastleDB http://castledb.org. 
The interface has been kind of sketchy to work in (on linux mostly), though it does the job pretty well. I'll do a deep dive into how i'm using CastleDB (which is formatted as json) to detect valid recipes for crafting.

Creatures will be stealing food from tents, we need to implement some pathfinding algorithm. Thankfully, Godot makes this task easy, we just need to ensure the tiles are set up properly. Again, I'll go deeper into this topic in a future post.

"Day Cycles" will control the flow of the days which act like a "game level" or "round". I'll explain how i use timers and signals to control this flow. More interestingly, i'll demonstrate dawn, sunrise, daytime, sunset, dusk, and night lighting!