Game concept and core loop

This is the first devlog of my new game Crime Syndicate: Heist Empire. I was looking for a new game to make and walking around at night trying to make your baby fall asleep gives you a lot of time to think. I wanted to make a simulation game for quite some time now but the Unity UI system always made me scared. Now I though I should give it a try. It started out as an idea “what if you had a management game but for criminals” and i started to flesh it out from there. Brainstormed a bit with ChatGPT and started writing a game design document in Notion. I like to make those documents as fleshed out as possible, so I can use the databases.

Normally I give up very quickly when beginning to make a project so I though I should counter that by first writing a game design document and already thinking about the technical structure before creating the project in unity. Also working in milestones, each with their own focus can help me to not want to do everything at once and keep fun things to do in each milestone to keep me motivated. So I created a demo milestone, wrote down acceptance criteria and made tickets for what needed to be done to reach those acceptance criteria. Once the technical structure was really thought out, f all the tickets and goals were written down, I created a project in Unity.

Normally my games look really ugly since I can’t do art very well, but I wanted to do pixel art and decided to create some very basic shapes and immediately it started to look 100 times better. I added a background and it just felt right.

I know the game looks very rough and you can’t do that much, but at least the core game loop is in there, the beginnings of the art style are visible and all the foundations are unplaced to build upon.

I’m glad I got to the point of finishing this update. On to the next one: a UI overhaul.