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My brain coming up with mechanics: (smart) Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants looking through a microscope, taking some notes
My brain coming up with story and characters: (dumb) Patrick that accidentally nailed a board to his head
I know copying/adapting an already existing story/character isn’t unheard of, but my goldfish memory can never remember any
I have this opposite problem where I have all the ideas and none of the energy and drive to implement them in a timely or professional manner.
Gonna dump a whole bunch of info about my current project below.
I’ve been working on a card collecting game prototype for over a week, it’s going to start out as a generic hero’s journey but as you unlock new difficulty modes you learn more about the context of the adventure and that everything about the characters are morally grey and they all deserve the ending they get.
How it will work is players build their deck, enter an instance, draw a hand where each card has a cost, and the cards automatically progress and find enemies and loot so that the player may hopefully continue the delve. When all cards are used and retired they retreat to the map menu and from there they can open the shop menu for more cards or the status menu to assign points towards buffs and abilities, then head back down into the dungeon.
To prevent softlock the player will get a monthly income based on the success of their delves and a special secret game over screen if they manage to get stuck anyways (save will revert to when they weren’t stuck).
Between maps will be some rng buff artifacts and boss fights.
So far the only thing in working order is dragging cards around and the camera and scene setup, but later I’m going to have to rewrite some of the code that measures how far the card has to go to follow the cursor based on the game resolution. Because it’s 3D and in layers I have to take the mouse x and y coordinates compared to the screen coordinates and then apply an ingame unit translation to the card of the fraction times the units needed to cover the viewport at that distance. So for example if it’s 1 unit away from the camera and 2 units wide but then at 2 units away from the camera it becomes 4 units wide, so clamp -2, 2 and move ( mouse.x/screen_res * 4 ) - 2 so for example mouse.x is 360px from bottom of 1080px screen, 360/1080 = 0.334, and 0.334 * 4 = 1.334, and 1.334 - 2 = -0.6667 so the card moves down the x axis that many meters. Obviously this is very clunky and has to be adjusted every time changes are made to the scene, so a better solution might be adding an invisible plane and cast a ray in the direction of the mouse then record the location of where the ray hit to send the card to that location.