Skip to content
Anduin Games

Untitled RPG II3 min read

A Grey Room and a White Circle

The first thing in the second RPG that you can actually move. It looks like almost nothing, and that is deliberate.

A prototype room in the Unity game view: four grey walls around a blue floor with a white circle in the middle.

Here is the current state of Untitled RPG Project II. A grey box with four walls, a blue floor, and a white circle you can walk around with a stick or the keyboard.

It is not much to look at. It is the first thing in this project that a person can hold, which makes it the most important thing in it so far.

Why it looks like nothing

The first playable milestone is a short list of things that have to work before any of them are worth making pretty. Movement in one room is on that list. So the room is four rectangles, the hero is a circle, and the art budget for the whole scene is zero.

That is on purpose, and it is the cheapest discipline in game development. Placeholder art cannot flatter a bad idea. If moving around this room feels wrong, it will feel wrong later with a beautiful sprite on top, except by then the sprite will be sunk cost and much harder to argue with. Grey boxes tell the truth early.

What is actually in it

More than the picture suggests, and all of it boring in the way foundations should be.

The hero has a physics body with gravity switched off, because this is a top-down world and nothing should fall. Its rotation is frozen, so clipping a wall corner does not send the circle spinning like a hockey puck. Collision is set to continuous and motion is interpolated, which together stop a fast-moving body from passing through a thin wall between two frames and stop it juddering when it does not.

Input goes through Unity's Input System with a single action map, so a controller works without a second code path bolted on later. Controller-first was decided on day one and it is much easier to keep than to retrofit.

Underneath, the project's own C# lives in its own assemblies with a test that fails if the boundary between them is crossed. That sounds like paperwork. It is the difference between a codebase you can still reason about in year two and one you cannot.

The Unity editor showing the PrototypeRoom scene: a hierarchy with four walls and a hero, the game view with the grey room, and the inspector showing the hero's physics body, collider, input component and movement script.
The same thing with the lid off. Move Speed is 5, which is a number chosen by feel and certain to change.

What this is not

It is not playable by anyone outside the studio, there is no build to hand out, and nothing here is close to final. The project page still says early, and it still means it.

It is also not the story. That stays where it is.

Next

The rest of the milestone list. When it is done it will be three to five minutes long, made entirely of placeholders, and shown to nobody. Its only job is to prove the central idea holds up in the hands before a single piece of real art is made for it.

If a thing does not work at three minutes, it will not work at forty hours. Grey boxes are how you find that out while it is still cheap.

See you in the next world.

  • rpg2
  • production
  • prototype