Hello Everyone, I started learning and working towards being an indie game developer for about 2 and a half months.
I've watched some basic guides, messed around with Unity for about 3 weeks and then decided to start working on my first project.

I always loved playing action rogue-lites and started working on one of my own, I've figured it would be a great genre to learn developing in because of the amount of different mechanics they have inside, different passive and active items, stats, a bunch of different enemies, systems and so on.

Some Stuff About Me: I live in Israel, I am 22 years old, working as a data engineer/developer in an outsource company. I've played a lot of games over the course of my life (as I'm sure most of us did haha) and always been passionate about them. Over the years I have been cooking a lot, and I figured one of the reasons are that I love making things, I love to see a result out of my work. that's not something that happens a lot in big industries and in my day to day job. I've decided to pick up indie game development to try and change the course of my career and daily life. (I mostly want to work towards being indie dev and not work in a big studio/company since I don't like the course of which industrial gaming is going toward). for now, I plan to make

What I'm Working On: I named my first game as "Arcane Archer", its a 2D PixelArt - Top Down - Action - Rogue-Lite game. the main character is a female mage, she studies in a magic academy and she needs to pass the final exam of the academy. The exam is made of a series of 4 areas, each containing monsters that needs to be killed. each area will contain boss/es, different theme and will have different types of rooms to challenge.

To pass the test, the mage needs to use all sort of magic spells, but she has never been able to cast ranged spells. to pass the test, she picks up a bow and enhances the arrows of the bow, that way she can use both close range spells and use her bow and arrow to use like long range spells.

Bow Gameplay: The bow will always be shooting, and shoot towards the mouse. the player can choose different types of materials to enhance the arrows to deal damage and apply effects.  examples can be an arrow that explodes in the end of it, a homing arrow, an arrow that electrifies anything near the position it hits, an arrow that slows enemies and more. (more stuff will be decided later)

Spell Gameplay: The spell system will be a more passive one, the player will be able to collect spells over the exam and they will be cast passively, they can be anything from explosions every x seconds, a trail of fire when you walk, a tornado that spawns and deals damage in an area over time, thunder strikes around the player and so on, the list is not decided yet.

Combat Rooms: The rooms will be made from waves of enemies (think of something like Brotato/vampire survivors if you played it), some rooms will be finished after X times, some rooms will require you to kill all the monsters that spawned.

Other Rooms: the game will have different types of rooms, from shop rooms, healing rooms, treasure rooms and maybe some challenge rooms (just an idea for the future)

Rogue-lite aspect: The exam will be designed to be a hard challenge, every time the player fails the exam they can upgrade different stats and passives to apply onto their character, making each run slightly easier. in the exam, the order of the rooms will be randomized, with different difficulties and rewards, the randomization will give the player place for decision making over what challenges to face, and what items and rewards to loot.

Gameplay Loop:  Enter the exam -> pass rooms -> end the run (fail or success) -> upgrade equipment and unlock more content -> go back in.

What I've done so far: up until now, I mostly built different mechanics in the game, the shooting mechanic, tested item pickups, some animations, particle effects, made some test enemies, test arrows, test spells and character stats.

What I'm Planning: Now that I've built the basics of the game, I want to create playable content towards a working demo. the demo will be made only from the first area, it will contain some types of enemies (currently I made 3, there might be about 6-7 depends on how it will feel), and a first boss. The game will have a elemental effects in it (elements are cool) and that also means that spells and arrows will have elemental attributes to them. for the demo I am planning to have only 3 elements (Fire, Ice and Lightning)

Some side notes:

1. In my dev journey, I hope to learn a bunch of new skills, my main focus will be on programming and game design, but I also want to learn some basics of art (leaning towards pixel art) and VFX, so I hope to use only self made pixel art and sprites. (they look pretty meh now, but I will get better over time)
2. I don't know what I don't know yet when I develop new content for the game, so I guess a lot of systems and assets will be remade over the time
3. I hope to get some feedback and maybe tips to work, My main goal in this devlog is to get better at communicating my ideas, meet new developers and players, and maybe even build a community over time.
4. This first devlog is made mostly to introduce myself, my game and where i go from here, on future devlogs I plan to give more detailed explanation of what I'm developing each time. (let me know if you think I should do more devlogs like that or make them more focused towards specific content and development in the game)
5. I'm planning to use my data analysis skills towards trying to make the game better, in demo testing and beta testing, hopefully it will help me make better decisions when it comes to what works and what doesn't.
6. I don't know how long it will take between devlogs and how long I plan to work on the game before I publish it since I working on it on my free time (about 1- 4 hours a day, most days are 1-2 hours tho)

Thanks for anyone who reached this far in my first devlog! I will do my best efforts to make this game as fun as it can be.

If you are interested in knowing a bit more, I have a more documented file about the game, let me know and I will send it.

some pictures of my game so far:

(the player was not made by me, I will replace it soon)