SECRET KEEP: Building a Castle (sketches & plans)

I've been doing a bunch of sketching and planning for SECRET KEEP.  

I thought I'd post a handful of these things here.  :D

Warming up my drawing hand with some sketches of items from The Black Cauldron (Disney, 1985).

Sketching some items from The Sword in the Stone (Disney, 1963).  

Trying out Charcoal Pencils for the first time!  Nice blacks, and a cool sketchy feel, but needs fixative!  :)

A little castle sketch from an interesting picture I found on the internet.

And a watercolor sketch of the king's castle in Daventry!  :D

A sketch of how an arrow loop looks from outside the castle (left) and inside the castle (right).

Thinking about how the user interface and interactivity will work.

It's finally time to knuckle down and actually come up with the layout of my castle for SECRET KEEP.

This task was bewildering me for a while because a castle is a complicated thing, and I want the location to feel grounded and real, and so I got sidetracked for quite some time just studying up about castle, and actually trying to understand all the main parts of a castle, where they are, and how they work.

I started to list out the elements that were important to me, that I wanted to include.

I decided to have six floors in total, including 3 above ground, and 2 below ground, and a tower.  The player won't know about all of these locations to begin with, and will learn more about the hidden parts of the castle, and how to access them, as they continue to explore the space and learn more about the story and characters that inhabit the castle.

I then started to translate those lists of rooms into actual floor layouts on another piece of paper.  It was good to use A3 paper for a lot of this work, to keep connected ideas on one page.  (I usually work on much smaller A5 pages when throwing down ideas, as I can carry an A5 clipboard around with me at all times).

Thinking more specifically about the spaces that would be important to the player, and where the game would start, around the kitchen, the garden and the great hall.

Once I had a sense of the rooms I wanted to include, I did a quick sketch on a small piece of paper, from side-on cross-section.

And finally, I ended up with a rough multi-floor plan of the entire keep of the castle, the crux of my game SECRET KEEP.  

I've just roughed out the position of each room, and now feel ready to start actually building the space in my Unity project.

A close up of the tower top room.

Now I'm ready to start actually building the castle in Unity!

My first computer game is nearly finished!

I am very excited.  My first computer game is nearly finished!

I've been working away in my bedroom, and sometimes in my funky Brunswick St office in Fitzroy, Melbourne, feeling like a pretty cool dude, to be honest...

I've been working away on the code, and the art, and the sound!  And it's nearly ready.

Recording skateboard sounds on my old 80s skateboard!

I've been sketching out ideas for games since I was 8 years old.  My grandmother was a draughtswoman, and loved to make funny birthday cards for us with pen, and water color pencils.  And of course, I was also inspired by fantasy book and games...

I've always loved a whole range of genres, and over the years I've dabbled away on text adventures, and little RPG projects, and sketched out designs for vehicle simulation games, driving, flying, jetpacking. I've worked on an Adventure Game Studio project or two.  I've made levels for Quake and Thief.  But I've never released my own game.  I've just never been able to!



Despite more than 10 years working on the games industry around Melbourne, I've never been able to figure out how to make my own games.  Until now.


I'm finally going to do it.  Release my own computer game.


Thanks to Apple bringing the marketplace directly to the developer, and mobile phone games in general helping to bring back smaller sized games, and Game Salad giving me a platform where I can create the behaviours, art, and sound for my games entirely on my own, I can now do it all on my own.  Indie games are the new indie band.  

I love the olden days of the one-man-game teams.  Many of the classic games from my youth were made by just one person.  Sometimes a few, but often just one person who did everything.  And I think there's something brilliant about that.  Like a novel, the vision is created from just a single person's imagination, and delivered to the reader / player in that intuitive form.

I want to make so many different sorts of games.  Retro action games, funny games, fantasy strategy games, vehicle simulation madness, story mystery games, oldschool adventure games, B-grade 70s games, stealth games, and beyond!


I'm worried that I will not make a good businessman.  That my choices will be based on fun, rather than monetisation.  Because fun is what seems right to me.  This whole Freemium craze has it's place, but many decisions seem to be made to the detriment of the game itself.  And in my books, game design is all about whatever is best for the game, best for the player.  I guess, as long as I can support myself, I really don't care.  I don't want to be a businessman.  I want to have fun!  I want to create games that people love, that engages them and forms a special place in their heart, like those magical games I've played over the years.