When we tell people we're making a game, one of the first questions people ask is "what engine are you using to make it?".
We selected Gdevelop as our game engine early on. Not Unity, not Unreal and not one of the many RPG makers out there. So why Gdevelop? If you're not familiar, Gdevelop is a free, open source "no-code" (i'll come back to that later) game engine for PC and mobile games.
One of the main reasons we chose Gdevelop was how quickly we can iterate on ideas. It has in-built and community created "behaviours" for lots of common game mechanics, for example, there's a behaviour for character top-down movement, collision detection and lots more. Having all this readily available means we can focus on the bits that make Darts RPG unique: darts, beer and gravy.
There are lots of other great features of Gdevelop such as one-click exports for multiple platforms, an instant preview of the game with no compile times and a great community around it with lots of tutorials and examples.
The core of Gdevelop is the events system. Instead of writing code, the game logic is built from conditions and actions. If a condition is met, then perform an action. This gives us loads of leverage as we can create proof-of-concepts of game ideas in just a handful of clicks.
While the events system does work for 75% of our game, there are cases where we have complexity that requires diving into writing code. Fortunately Gdevelop allows you to write code in Javascript too and we use this quite extensively.
Gdevelop is advertised as a no-code game engine and it's absolutely true you can create a complete game without a single line of code. However, as the complexity of the game grows, knowledge of programming and programming concepts like flow control and data structures become important. If you're getting into game dev, i'd recommend checking it out!
Enough about game engines, let's talk about our coasters feature.
Coasters in Darts RPG are "cards" you can collect and play during darts matches. These can give you a boost for accuracy or XP, but also negatively affect your opponent.
We've split coasters into two categories, boost and power.
Boost coasters are active for the duration of the game. These can increase your accuracy by a small amount, or increase your XP or cash payout at the end of the game.
Power coasters are more tactical, these directly affect yourself or your opponent. They can increase your accuracy, decrease you're opponent's accuracy - or something more direct like letting a wasp loose to distract your opponent. These coasters are short lived so you need to pick the right moment to play them!
This is our initial round of coasters, we've still not decided what the duck coaster does yet, so if you read this and have any ideas, leave a comment below!