Iridium Moons is my first attempt at learning how to make videogames all by myself, using only free software and resources, and with barely any existing knowledge or experience with either programming or 3D modelling. 15-20 years ago, this would probably have been impossible. But now with Godot and Blender, and all the available free documentations and guides, this is mostly a matter of putting in the time and keeping up the motivation. And having somewhat realistic expectations of how much work a single hobbyist could actually do. While I’ve been going into this with very few technical skills, my main hobby for the last 15 has been creating my own material for pen and paper RPG campaigns. And for the kinds of videogames I am interested in, there’s actually a very significant overlap in overall game design, specific game mechanics, storytelling, and purposeful worldbuilding. Which I think might be just as valuable. I also did some level design, item design, and scripting for a Neverwinter Nights server 20 years ago, which does provide me with a general understanding of the basic concepts of videogame architecture.
The concept for Iridium Moons is probably not a good choice for learning the basics of Godot and Blender. But for me, being really in love and excited about the thing I am working on is very important to stay motivated. Making something purely as a practice piece to gain skills that I will need to later start working on the thing I really want to make isn’t working for me.
Iridium Moons is intended to be some kind of first-person 3D ImSim game focused on outdoor and underground exploration, resource management, and stealth, with elements of investigation, set in a retro-futuristic Space Fantasy setting. The player is a salvage explorer who specializes in tracking down and recovering spare parts for century old machines that are operating well beyond their specified usage limits and selling them to customers who can not afford to upgrade their equipment to more modern standards.
The world of Iridium Moons is a remote star cluster that was heavily mined for rare minerals for nearly 200 years, but been abandoned by the large interstellar mining companies for the last three generations. Some of the original workers stayed behind on the planets they were born and grew up on even after all the large mines had closed, and their descendants created a new rural and largely agrarian society among the abandoned refineries and factories and worn out machines that were left behind. Back in those early days, spare parts for machines and equipment were literally lying around everywhere and of little value. But after more than half a century of being left to rust, many pieces and components have become quite rare and very valuable, making it a very profitable business to know where specific pieces can still be found and recovering them for clients desperately in need of them.
The player character is not a strong hero, and the objectives of the game do not revolve around fighting off a great enemy force. Instead, the intended approach for getting into ruined mines and refineries is to fix up old machinery to gain access to blocked off areas while trying to avoid drawing too much attention, and evading any pirates, bandits, or dangerous alien creatures that might be nearby. In that regard, the planned gameplay has a strong resemblance to Stalker and Thief.
But the world in which these exploration adventures are set is one heavily by pulp Space Fantasy from the 80s, which themselves was already heavily referencing even older space adventure stories from the 50s and 60s. Star Wars being of course the main example, as well as Flash Gordon and Masters of the Universe. I am a huge fan of the works of Moebius, Rralph Bakshi, and Jim Henson, whose style of presenting fantastical worlds has been sadly out of styles for decades now and gotten very little attention in videogames. Similarly, I intend to go for a graphics style strongly reminiscent of the Raw 3D graphics of the late 90s like in many PlayStation 1 games, or Quake, Thief, and Half-Life, with realistically proportioned but very low-polygon models and unblurred, low-resolution textures. But combined with modern lighting and shadow techniques. I find this art style very visually appealing, like 3D pixel art, but it is also a very labor efficient approach that should help significantly with making the creation of large number of 3D assets manageable for a single person.
Going for a game that covers both outdoor and dungeon exploration in an open-world manner is certainly ambitious, but I believe that with the chosen art style and freely available tools for Godot, this will still be manageable in a reasonable amount of time. As for the game mechanics, the free COGITO template already provides most of the basic mechanics for a typical ImSim, which should greatly help with making it a working game even with little experience in programming of any kind, and make the whole undertaking somewhat more similar to extensive modding than creating a new game completely from scratch.