An idea

First a small introduction, my name is Firas Ma’ayah, I’m a 3D Designer and Artist, and an architecture graduate, (you can check my work here: https://www.artstation.com/v737), all my life I have mostly had 2 passions, 3D art and Games, as such these 2 passions merged to become a passion for game development, and so I embark on this long journey to create my first full game as a solo developer.

 After a bunch of mini game projects, a few jams, and a lot of failed ideas, I decided to put my mind into this and finally create a full game, and after an idea formed and production started, I thought of creating this devlog, as a sort of journal through my path, learning stuff along the way as I make this small idea of mine a reality, hoping some people at least enjoy this path with me and maybe learn a thing or two. and more likely me learning a thing or two from them.

 The First step of any project as you all know, is an Idea.

The idea for this game came from my background as a 3D artist and designer, and the lack of background in programming and coding. I wanted to create a game that challenged my skills as a 3D artist to be visually stunning, but at the same time to be simple to code, while still remaining interesting. but I didn’t want to use these 3D skills as a visual front only, I wanted to integrate it into the mechanic of the game as well.

I have always been interested in the idea of telling a story through the environment, to show how the life of the people living inside of a house affect this house and shape it. And that is precisely what I aim to do in this game. To tell a story through the environment.

The environment is what the player sees, interacts with and alters, subsequently changing the lives of the people living in this environment. And as such the environment is not only there to look nice, but it is the storyteller.

While incorporating the above idea, I wanted the story to have branches, and multiple endings, but instead of a couple of endings and branches I wanted to give the player the feeling that he can alter the environment in as many ways as possible, so I came up with a sandbox system, where the player can alter something in the environment then go forward in time and see how what he did changed the environment in the future. I will reveal more about the sandbox system later as I make more progress on it.

This is how the idea for causality came to be, a game where the environment tells a story and where you can alter this environment causing different events to unfold in the future.

I’m going to refrain from revealing too many details about the core mechanics and the story that I planned for now, as they still need refining, I will reveal them slowly as I progress through this path bit by bit.

I will be posting more logs explaining the process I worked in in each step up till now and continue updating this devlog as I go along one step at a time.