Ok, it's time to start, from the origins.
Actually this is not my first project, and even before i started releasing videogames i spent several years messing with snes hacks, along with an unfinished browser game, for something like 8 years.
In the latest 5 years, i worked also on 3 other videogames: the first two are the audiogame series of Hell Hunter (Hell Hunter: Anti-Nomen and Hell Hunter: Damned Soul, they are on itch as well), in which aside being the author, i did pretty much anything, in particular programming, game design, writing, and sound design (which is quite deep when we talk about audiogames).
The third one is a RPG named Dragonero: The rise of Draquir, which has been released on Steam so far. As i'm writing this post, i'm currently a Senior game designer.
After releasing the third game, one day, around the end of 2023, while joining a dinner with the staff, my boss asked me about what i wanted to do next (he heard from the Director of the third game that i wanted to make some game on my own). I didn't explained anything in particular to him, but actually there's currently something like 2-3 games inside me that i want to make, and considering the timing, seems that that was the chance to seriously considering making the first one, namely The Rogue of Nexus.
He warned me about preparing myself for the start of 2024, because if i wanted to start, then i had to be pretty damn sure about it: after all, when we talk about budgets and deadlines, developent stops being an hobby and becomes a job.
For clarification: i'm not an employee of PowerUp Team, but rather an external collaborator of it. For The Rogue of Nexus, since it's the publisher, that means that i'm a sort of customer, and at the same time i work for it.
Well, the next year arrived and i gathered my thoughts, since my boss still didn't know what exactly i wanted to do, he talked me about several possibilies: since there was a quite limited budget, the scope of the project was bound to be limited as well. He had some ideas like a series of horror short games, but i had something else in my mind, so it was time to show him what i wanted to do: this means it's time to make a Mockup, pretty much the first raw document that comes up from the Ideation of a project.
Here's my first Mockup of The Rogue of Nexus: (WARNING: it's huge! i had to cut it in 4 pieces)
The text is in italian so probably there's not much to read about, i didn't show the last part but it's not too much important to share.
Ok, so in the mockup i start explaining the 3 main game modes (worldmap, battle, dungeon), how they work and where those references come from (The Binding of Isaac and Half-Minute Hero). Right after the most important thing to explain is the Core gimmick/s, namely The Hand, so how it works, how it behaves and how it interacts with the player (well in the actual game if it catches you, you won't explode in a bubble of blood haha). Aside the Hand, i added the consequences of its destruction (darkness and dark dungeons) and how that works.
Then i added other contents like the artifacts, talked about RNG, the specifics of game assets, the scope of the project and its length. Fun fact: the genre and other details shoud be at the very beginning but i put them almost at the bottom... not a good idea. I don't know if it would be better to have a name (a temp one at least), but maybe it's not the case of spending some time on it, considered that you don't even know if the idea will be approved, when you're not going completely solo.
About the scope of the project, i noticed i did a reasonable thing: not deciding a static size of the project, more precisely, instead of saying "this game is supposed to last 40 hours, the worldmap has this size and is split in 10 areas" i instead specified what depends on the budget amount, so for example for x budget you'll get n1 artifacts, n2 allies, n3 enemies and n4 areas in worldmap; and for budget y you'll get instead m1 artifacts, m2 allies, m3 enemies and m4 areas.
It's extremely important to know what will make escale the budget (and time!) of your project, because you'll easily lose control on that if you plan poorly the scope. In fact, i imagined at the beginning that the game should had 10 areas... at its release they are 4. I'm not even saying that if they stayed 10, the project would have been collapsed (which is a given), but rather that they wouldn't even approved the budget for start its developement.
1 year and 9 months later the game is here, so my boss liked the mockup (he told me anyway that the project looked quite complicated, hence it required several proofs its developement sustainability, namely me being able to code and implement this stuff)... that was the beginning of this project.
There was a rule though: it was supposed to be developed on an early stage for a mobile release, and then its full version on PC... and since you're reading this, maybe, you just realized that it kinda happened the opposite haha, and that because incidents happen anytime during the developement of a game, and the following posts will tell more about such incidents along the way.
PS. The mockup has been written taking into account the features of the 100% completed game, like allies and story mode, along with other extra interactions, but i specified what was supposed to be cut out from the 1.0 version, because that was obviously too much stuff to handle, as a matter of fact there's still no trace of allies in the 1.1.1 version of the game.