Devlog - Legend of the Abyss

[LordFall]

I was talking with Leo today about using AI to make video games and he didn't believe AI would be that helpful so here is my devlog to prove otherwise! I have been ideating this world building project for around 4 months now and mainly using AI for generative images and lore building but I fundamentally wanna make a game out of it as I think that medium is more powerful than something like just a manga or an anime which I do also plan on making eventually.

I don't have experience in game development, my main related skills would be in marketing and content creation. I tried my hands at unity a couple months ago and it was I mean not too bad but really frustrating and I got as making this square on the blue background that you see below but it was a very empowering feeling. 

I really like this video that I watched here

That basically warns you about trying to take on an overly ambitious game project and making your dream game right away and instead trying to ship modular projects that work and are profitable and build upon that over years to eventually build your dream game. 

I like this idea especially as my dream game is a VR web 3 MMORPG, and mmos are notoriously hard to build but I want particularly one with a well developped economy that ties into the real world so I think that will encounter even more novel issues.

My current idea is to make a simple 2D roguelite game as a MVP test project and build upon my ideas from this foundation. I think it's possible to bootstrap by myself with just mostly my time and a few hundred dollars of budget in tools to kick things off. I'm gonna use the Unity engine as it's free for startups and seems like a powerful engine both to make the 2D version of the game and eventually transfer the game assets to VR. 

I think there is a very powerful feedback look that's able to be utilized these days where you take on a project and document yourself building the game(in this context but can be anything) and that serves as your initial userbase and community to launch the game when it's ready. I've followed a few people that did it this way and it seems to be a very powerful way to bootstrap your own game studio basically.

I used to play a lot of League of Legends and did got paid for it for a while. Made it to challenger which is top 0.01% of playerbase and that was really fun and I feel like Riot did a great job building a community in their game that was the biggest in the world at that time and I met many friends in real life that also played the game so it was a great social experience as well.

I feel that they built a lot of cool stuff around their IP like the show arcane, esports world championship tournaments and local leagues but it fell short of what I think a gaming ecosystem could be. I'm a big believer in web 3 and eco investing in a gaming ecosystem with your playerbase instead of just squeezing them for cosmetics in exchange of a fun consumer experience. For example as a league player I invested something like 20 000 hours into my account, got a lot of rare cosmetics and high rank badges and emblems, spend like $2500 of my own money in the game and if I tried to sell my account it would be worth like $500 at best where as in other game ecosystems like Eve online and games like Counterstrike your time investment is translated to actual assets that are worth tens of thousands of dollars in some cases.

Multiple people in different ways talk about the downfall or collapse of the gaming industry, I think it's dramatized as the profits are still there even though a lot of layoffs and downsizing are unfortunately happening in the industry but I do agree that gaming as a whole has stagnated big time. I think web 3, AI agents and VR/AR offer unique opportunities to supercharge the industry and bring it into a new era of glory. Riot Games actually ruined my favorite champion in League of Legends through a rework and thus it actually ruined a big part of my enjoyment of the game so that's also part of my motivation in wanting to develop my own game. 

There is a massive MMO project that just collapsed last month and I find that very sad as it was a very ambitious project that had a lot of hype in the community but it was ultimately mishandled through overambition, lack of transparency and corruption. I aim to take some of their good ideas and learn from their mistakes.

There is also another game that I enjoyed playing that did operate for a while Spellbreak which was a really fun mage PvP game that ultimately fell short of its potential. I really like this mage PvP system so that's a big part of the inspiration for Legend of the Abyss that I wanna carry out. Their mistake was also making it too competitive and not casual friendly which was something that League of Legends managed to do very well.

Feel free to subscribe to the Youtube channel for the project here. So far I've only posted basic character concept arts and game concepts but I want to start doing devlogs especially if I managed to build community interest around it.

I think AI tools immensely empower small teams and creators to accomplish massive thing and I hope to prove it with legend of the abyss. If you have interest in helping out the project and joining the team I would totally be open to having co-founders on it! 

Edited 8 hours ago by LordFall