How it started

I'm an RPG fan, always has been my favourite genre of game, I love the immersion, discovery, questing etc.. so being a game developer I've always wanted to create my own. I've put the task off for years because I've been on the hypercasual bandwagon hoping to make enough money to fund my RPG development. Well that failed, hypercasual is miserable and a mugs game to be in, its boring and most roads lead to nowhere. Well, I have a full time job so my development has to work around that, I tend to spend all my spare time outside of work / family developing Twilight Haven, its stressful but fun. So after removing all the self imposed blockers of oh but you have a job, oh but what if it fails, oh but this and that I plunged ahead and started development.

The story actually goes back a number of years, I created a game called Dungeon Miner. Another genre of games I like is mining (I love Minecraft too, I just love digging and exploring), Some time after that I decided to create an axe throwing game, but wanted to make this about exploration and mining, I ended up with all sorts of features in there to extend game play, such as shop, crafting, spells, repairs, quests, dungeons, you can see where this is going.

Out of this was born a game called Dig Dugger (yes for those of you old enough to know its a play on the Dig Dug name; a game from the 1980's), at some point I decided to add a town to the game so that the player could visit upon exiting the mines. At the town you could carry out tasks such as craft, repair, buy / sell items:

I added quests too as I was adding more depth to basically what was a pick axe throwing mining game. The game ended up looking like this:

Mineshaft Town Early Development

It was becoming clear that I had already built many of the components of a RPG game so I decided to take the plunge and actually turn this game into a fully fledged RPG game. I started ripping out the old axe throwing mechanic, added in characters, a proper tiled map town that the character could run around, buildings that the character could enter, NPC's that the player could talk to and so on.

Mineshaft WIP

The game  has come on leaps and bounds since then, I will add more dev blogs outlining the last 9 months of development over the coming weeks and months.