Hello, and welcome to my development blog for the game Shades of Grey.
This blog's purpose to help me keep track of my development ideas, progress, and receive feedback from you and the rest of the Internet on my first foray into the world of game development. My goal is to create a compelling game not just through my vision of what the game ought to be, but also what you, the players, will want to play. This begs some few obvious questions.
So who am I? My name's Kyle and I am a second year law student (as of the time of this post) at the Benjamin N. Cardozo school of law in NYC.
So you're studying to be a lawyer, and trying to develop video games. I don't see the connection.
While being in graduate school is time consuming, I have always wanted to develop my own game, and there's no time like the present to finally sit down and make it happen. Perhaps one day I can make money from one of these professions to subsidize the other...
So what is Shades of Grey?
Shades of Grey is the working title of a RPG in the vein of Wizardry, Etrian Odyssey, or Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey (just to name a few influential games). The characters will traverse areas from a first person perspective, fight groups of enemies in turn based combat, and use the souls of enemies they negotiate with to create equipment to fight bigger and stronger foes.
Why such an old school game/RPG?
This is for two reasons: The first is that I am a big fan of the turn based RPG and feel they do not receive enough love in the modern market place. Second is that my programing skills are 0 and creating game play systems for a turn based game is easier on the programing and cheapens art costs. The soul of the game will be in the fighting, story and crafting, not the graphics, and that's fine with me.
Wait...no programing experience? How are you going to make this?
I'm dodging that issue as long as possible, but I figure I'll either partner up with some programmers down the road, once most of the game is properly conceptualized and reduced to formulas, or I'll teach myself by the time I need it. Nothing going on here is going to be a difficult programing challenge, at least I hope not. Instead, the creativity of the systems is going to be the key.
So why am I reading this blog then?
You readers will have the ability to help shape the game as I develop it. I have plenty of game play ideas, but I am often my own best echo chamber, and sometimes bad ideas start sounding good. By sounding ideas off of you readers, I can work smarter, not harder, and create something that is not only fun for me, but also for you. Additionally, how many opportunities do you have to try to discuss the intricacies of how an ex-con should attempt to fight legions of demons? Not often I bet.
What platform will this one day be on?
PC. My goal is to get this onto Steam.
So come join the discussions and I hope to see your comments out in the field.