To preface, I know that building any type of game takes an innumerable amount of time, effort and skill. I also know that for someone wanting to make a game without any experience, it is even more difficult.
That being said, I have zero experience in doing so, but am more than willing to put in the time and effort, and I’m especially willing to learn the skills needed.
The type of game I’m wanting to make is a survival FPS (and would love to have some multiplayer), with as realistic graphics as I can make them, set in a relatively big open world. Not Skyrim level big, but I want to have a decently sized town in it with a few different types of areas, such as forest, lake, etc. This town will be completely surrounded by mountains, and let’s just say that with the help of cliffs and the town being on quarantine status by the government, you won’t be able to leave.
However right now because I have no experience, I definitely do not want to overwhelm myself with a bunch of things all at once and honestly want to start slow.
My question is, is it a good idea to simply start with building the environment first, meaning the terrain, then worry about all buildings, vehicles, characters and everything that makes a game a game, after? If this makes for an easier way to get into game development then I definitely want to do it this way. And I can always change the environment at any stage of development if I need to.
My very basic plan (for now) is to sculpt and form all environment areas, get the land, mountains and lake the way I want them to look, then add in the trees, grass, dirt, etc. until I have a pretty good and natural looking environment to be in.
After that I will probably lay down all the roads, and get a good layout of how I want them to be, then start placing buildings, and figuring out the mechanics of how to make those work such as opening doors/windows/drawers/cabinets, figuring out how to do plumbing/electricity, etc.
Once I have all of things that will fill the world in place, and all of the mechanics that make everything I want the player to be able to do work, I will then worry about NPC’s if any, multiplayer, different game modes, animations, etc.
I will say this as well, because I have no game building experience, there will probably be very few things that I create myself, such as objects. When I get to that point I will of course try, and I will definitely try to fill my game with as much of my own created content as I possibly can. But to save time and stress, a good portion will probably be assets purchased from the marketplace, which I will alter if need be. After all, that’s what they are for.
So, is this a good plan? Will building from the ground up like this and giving myself an ordered list of things that I need to learn to do help?
Thank you everyone.
And as always, any awesome tutorials you guys could point me to, especially on environment creation would be appreciated!