4 years ago, 2021, I was a beginner programmer in many things, but one of the things I liked most was Roblox Studio, which meant I got recommended game dev videos unrelated to Roblox on YouTube. After being exposed to a ton of game dev content, I began to have floods of ideas for what I could make. I had a laptop that’s now 13 years old and didn’t directly meet Unity’s system requirements, but I installed Unity anyway. I began applying a game idea immediately, no courses, no nothing, simply Brackeys and a lot of other YouTube videos at my disposal (as well as Stack Overflow and other forums)... The game idea never changed, but after I learnt how to use Unity properly, I remade the project and had a fresh start.
This idea didn’t have a name, so I chatted with an online developer…
4 years ago, 2021, I was a beginner programmer in many things, but one of the things I liked most was Roblox Studio, which meant I got recommended game dev videos unrelated to Roblox on YouTube. After being exposed to a ton of game dev content, I began to have floods of ideas for what I could make. I had a laptop that’s now 13 years old and didn’t directly meet Unity’s system requirements, but I installed Unity anyway. I began applying a game idea immediately, no courses, no nothing, simply Brackeys and a lot of other YouTube videos at my disposal (as well as Stack Overflow and other forums)... The game idea never changed, but after I learnt how to use Unity properly, I remade the project and had a fresh start.
This idea didn’t have a name, so I chatted with an online developer who was my friend at the time, and we just slapped together this name: HALIENS
HALIENS, Hacking + Aliens, Harry and the Aliens, we had multiple meanings behind it... All of them were lame, but the project kept dragging on for so long that "HALIENS" just stuck as its own name, without any meaning or symbolism behind it, and it felt too late to change it.
It would take me too long to describe the exact timeline of what happened with that project, and it would be exceptionally tedious considering the fact that I’ve told this story a billion times so far... 3 times of them being public:
- On "our" website, which was proman4713gamedev.com before the domain expired, and this became its URL: https://homepage-2sg.pages.dev/
- On our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Proman4713GameDev
- On my latest YouTube channel’s first video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYe8YqWcqv8 (the game didn’t actually take 4 years, I miscalculated. It was only 1 year)
The website has an outdated way of showing Discord profile pictures, and this blog post may just convince me to release the first update in years to fix it.
I had no money to spend on game-making, and I could barely develop the actual game, and I was a little bit too unwise to be leading a game dev group. But regardless, I had a team of volunteers who kept coming and going over time.
In late 2023, as I got busy developing another thing, I completely gave up on HALIENS; I had deemed it "too demanding" of time and money to be completed. But I still cared for it, so I still made sure the project was pushed to GitHub with its last unfinished, unreleased changes.
And if you checked out the links I mentioned above, then you may have noticed that the game graphics improved dramatically from what is shown on PGD’s channel versus what’s shown in Codeswallop’s first video: This wasn’t an in-progress update that wasn’t released before the game was cancelled; this was actually a change that I made while editing Codeswallop’s video just to make the recordings look good for it! I still cared about making the game look and feel good.
Do not think that I didn’t try to fix the game’s lighting during the main period of development; I did for days and weeks, and it never worked. And it’s just another proof of me having been simply too naive back then, because a few years later, and a few months ago, while editing Codeswallop’s video, and revisiting the HALIENS project files after years, I was able in a few minutes to describe the issue with the graphics well enough in my head, form a good Google search out of it, and doing the steps to change my project graphics from the built-in renderer to URP (the Universal Rendering Pipeline).
This may seem like a bunch of useless information, but if you think about it, this incredibly oversimplified story gives us some key information:
- I hadn’t done any preparation or studying of the HALIENS project (not even a game design doc), and therefore simply missed the option of creating the Unity project with the URP option and avoiding all that hassle.
- I didn’t have the skills to actually make a game this large. Whereas now I do know 2D art, video editing, voiceover, and am much better at Game/System Design (because it’s not just the game you have to design, there’s a back-end too)
- I didn’t have the resources to do this: Unity sometimes took 30+ minutes to do certain actions on my old laptop. And I learnt pseudo-best practices like alt+tabbing to the Unity editor to start script compilation and then back to VS 2019 so that it compiles faster?
- And finally, we can deduce, from this info and from context that would take too long to explain here, that I was simply too unwise to finish this through.
Now, why am I saying all this? I just went on and on about the mistakes without really giving a clear conclusion. Well, first and foremost, I want everybody, especially young people who are excited to see their names in a game’s credits screen, to learn from my mistakes. But I don’t want to present video essays that explain game design techniques; GMTK and others already do an awesome job at this.
I want to present understandable, personal experiences and show their direct consequences on the fate of my game. And this will not be the last blog post, god willing. And I will share more and more over time. I also have other article series that I kept hanging, and I will try to fulfil my promises there.
Despite all of these problems, I still like game dev, and I like games that have meaning, because too few do these days. And, of course, I like games like those that I want to make.
I want to fix the mistakes that were made during HALIENS’s development. I want to study any game before I make it, I want to plan it well, and I want to ensure it doesn’t go out of hand the same way HALIENS did.
But I’m not giving up on HALIENS, I’m here to give you a plot twist: my next game idea is simply HALIENS’s prequel, HALIENS Season 0: It all begins (the title "It All Begins" is subject to change). This isn’t something I pulled out of thin air; this was planned back during HALIENS’s main game development:
- HALIENS Season 1, the main game, with its story, which is available in a badly articulated way on its webpage.
- HALIENS Season 0, the prequel, telling the story of how humans ruined their planet. This was planned to be a 2/2.5D game, unlike the other two 3D games.
- HALIENS Season 2, the sequel, telling the story of the player’s journey to find other human life after S1’s events.
The release of seasons 1, the main game, and 2 is incredibly unlikely unless season 0 makes some sort of miraculous success. But the making of S0, if it happens, will allow us to use many assets, UIs and scripts that were already made for S1, except the main logo, which is unique to the events of S1.
I’m not guaranteeing the development of season 0; I’m only guaranteeing that I keep sharing my experience in game dev and general coding, and that I make a sincere attempt at studying and planning season 0 to determine if it’s a dream worth pursuing.
If you wish to know more about me, my journey, or HALIENS, then simply join my Discord server, follow my DEV.to, or Buy me a Coffee with a custom message so that I contact you personally :)
I shall start the planning and structuring phase of HALIENS S0 soon enough, and I’ll follow every stage I finish with a post here on my DEV.to, and maybe a YouTube video as well.
Any demos or trailers I release will be on my Discord server. With every post, I’ll detail everything that I did differently compared to HALIENS S1, so that I provide solutions to the problems I described today and much more. And I hope that I helped an aspiring game dev somewhere with this post, to see a mistake that they’re currently making and be warned, so that they don’t fall into the same traps.
And, as always, Happy Hacking :)