Part Time Heros

What am I doing

Last time I put a post up here I said that I’ve always wanted to tell stories, I’ve just never found the time or methodology that I’ve wanted to use. There is one story that has been bumping around in the back of my brain for a long time and now Im going to tell a PART of that story, but differently.

I’m keeping some of the world building and a large part of the motivations of the worl, just not the magic system I lovingly handcrafted. Instead Im going to tell a story about a magic gone wrong, abscent gods, wild magic and an accident; you, you’re the accident.

An everyday person summoned by the grad spell of the ancient mages, picked up by the disused experiment of abscent gods and slammed into the role of saviour. Except that you aren’t a knight or a wizard, you’re just a cook, or a merchant.

In this world, everyone has levels, skills, classes and you’re no exception. The difference is your class isn’t made for battle, and the system has to try and shoe horn in things that will work as you travel the world trying to prevent disaster.

Im not going to write it as a story. Instead Im going to do it as a game. Say hello to Part Time Heroes.

Part Time Heroes temporary splash screen:

Starting with Engines

I started with Unity and decided to see what happened. Honestly, it was bloated but a wealth of things and code that people had already solved made it very temping. Ultimately I really didn’t think it was the right call and tried other options:

• No Engine but Libraries and C++ Raylib
• Godot C++ and C# (Why was this so annoying)

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

And so I went back to Unity. I will admit, the plugins available under VSCode and the built in assistant did help me solve very early problems.

Initial builds were understandably bare bones:

Steaming content, all editable

The ultimate goal was to have nothing in this game be a unity asset set in stone. Everything would be streamed and editable. If you opened it in the Unity editor you would see one scene with a camera element, that is all. So I decided to go as barebones as possible and to - hopefully - the lowest common denominator. Everything in the game is in csv files and can be modded, changed and tweaked at any point, and I mean everything. The physics, the player skills, health, aim assist, aggo, and more.

I even put all of the levels into CSV (it certainly not normalised data), and there is a simple editor to help me build out levels and not get caught up remembering what needs to go where.

The editor that saves my bacon:

Thats me for now. I’ll say more later as things progress.

E-P out!