Swords and Plowshares is pet project of mine which I started as a creative outlet and an excuse to spend more time on things related to video games, without the guilt of spending all my time on actual video games. Once realising the scale of creating a game, not just the programming but the design, story, dialogue, art and music, I realised that it is a huge effort to even get to a stage where it is remotely playable. At this point I realised I was in over my head but also so far down the rabbit hole that I've stuck at it. Also the game I wanted to create is obnoxiously complicated for a first attempt, however I wanted to make something I was actually interested in rather that a flappy bird clone.

May 2019 - First Update

The idea behind the game has changed through its development, but it looks something along the lines of this:

• The game is a 2D top-down RPG, in which you control a player who has to rebuild an abandoned town.
• The time setting is tbc but somewhere around the 18th century is probably accurate.
• The player must use resources produced by the town to help it be rebuilt and grow.
• The resources can be traded with merchants at the port to gain different foreign and exotic resources.
• What you trade and produce will determine how the town grows, and who it attracts.
• The end goal is to have a thriving town which has grown and expanded based on decisions made by the player. You could be a trader of illicit goods with smugglers and turn the town into seedy place, or focus on the trading of strange, magical materials and attract mysterious folk. This summary is very broad as so much of the games design is still TBC, so later on I will add more of a comprehensive summary.

Those points were copypasted out of my HUGE word document/brain dump, in which most content is out of date. Recently I've only been updating the bug list as I've enoyed tweaking and refactoring code rather than dealing with the larger scary features. This is a symptom of my current approach to developing being fairly terrible. As you can see above I've had an idea of how the game will play generally but as time goes on bits will change or become clearer. Thus I'll work on what I find interesting at the time rather than following a coherent plan or structure. My first major milestone is to have the basic tutorial, which is nearly implemented, however I'm constantly distracted by getting artistic improvements or fine tuning animations etc. Currently I'm making the Player animation more modular, so rather than having the entire player sprite animated it's broken down into chunks so that if you want to change your trousers at somepoint, it can be done. This will be important eventually, but right now it's a tad uneccessary.