My First (Finished) Project
Hustle Life: Drug Dealing RPG was my first big finished project. This was the project I have spent most time creating and the project I was ultimately most proud of.
The development of the game was pretty rough and there were often large periods of time between working on the project. Graphically I am not the most talented person in the world. So it was pretty discouraging working on the project some times.
Almost all of the assets were made by myself and it was quite hard to pull off. I didn't want to spend too much time in creating the assets. The programming side was of more interest to me.
I initially, was surprised by the amount of time it took to develop all of the assets. I think it highlights the importance of having a proper plan in place before you actually start doing any work. Many times I have had to redesign elements of the UI (as it is a UI heavy game). This was a pain at times because I had everything designed "pixel perfectly" and added texts would mess up the design.
I certainly lost a lot of time by making these mistakes. Ultimately I think these mistakes were necessary to become better at not only game development but also planning out other things. Having a proper plan in place ensures you are covered by "most" things that could go wrong in the process.
Hustle Life was developed using Construct 3. I think Construct 3 is a great game engine for complete beginners like I was at the time. Applying the logic to the game is very intuitive when using Construct 3. The only problem I have with the engine is that it is quite hard to manage the project as the complexity scales up.
I had Construct 3 scripts that were thousands of events long, I must admit that it also wasn't the most optimized script. But this also shouldn't be expected from complete beginners to game development.
Another aspect I truly loved about Construct 3 was the support, questions I had were quickly answered and they actively fixed problems I (and probably others) was facing.
Exporting a game to different platforms is extremely easy when using Construct 3. I highly recommend Construct 3 for people who are just starting to get into game development and have no programming knowledge. It will still take some figuring out to getting used to it. It is definitely the fastest way to learn though.
I think that the success of the game didn't come from the amount of work I put into it. Although it is a small factor. I think I had selected a good "niche" and had great help with developing my ASO description for the Google Play Store.
I think this is a aspect many people neglect when making a game. Making a good game is one thing but making it stand out in the crowd of games is another. This is definitely not something you should neglect.
Creating this post also made me realise there are actually a lot of unused assets I still have. I made lots of content for the game that has never seen the light of day. I am glad I got to share some of the assets.
Hustle Life got taken down from both big app stores. I compiled a new version of the game that is available to download here.
