I’m building a pixel-art life sim game with elements of farming, mining, hunting, fishing, trading/shopping and light combat.

Motivation

I’ve always been very inspired by the story of ConcernedApe and the development of Stardew Valley. But I was intimidated by the task since it is a monumental endeavor for one man to do all things all by oneself - coding, pixel-art, music, game design and so on. It seems like something you could only fantasize at the dead of night, not something remotely realistic and tangible. Nonetheless, I enjoyed reading ConcernedApe’s devlog from 8 or 9 years ago, when SV was still being developed. Early this year, a game called Feed the Cups was released, and the game was developed by a couple basing in Chengdu. This game has a seemingly simple idea, and the scope of the game seems manageable for a solo developer. Around the same time, I discovered Chef RPG and Pixel Architect’s YouTube channel. I was instantly hooked by this game and it’s dev vlogs since it has arguably the most beautiful pixel art out of all the indie games out there. All these amazing stories fueled my desire to develop my own pixel-art game, and create something new from scratch.

I have absolutely zero experience in game dev. Frankly speaking, I’m not even a big gamer, just a casual one. I have no idea what the basic building blocks of a game are. Luckily, there are so many amazing tutorials on YouTube and all I need to do is following some tutorials and do some pet projects to get myself going.

I followed three tutorials from the begining to the end, built small scale games with player animation, basic movement and some actions, tilemap, inventory system, health system, simple dialogues, some UI elements, and so on. This learning experience gave me the confidence boost to actually go out and make the game I want to make.

Progress

Here is a laundry list of components that I have completed so far for my game:

  • Come up with a storyline to tell in my game
  • Player setup
    • Customization (hair, clothese, pants, shoes, equipment)
    • Movement
  • A system to create item/equipment resources and use them by the player
  • Player interaction with destroyables (e.g. tree, rock) with equipment
  • Inventory system and hotbar for adding items and equipping tools
  • Practice pixel-art

Timeline

My goal is to build the skeleton of the game, namely, all the necessary systems for the game within a year (Aug 2025), this includes:

  • Day and night system
  • Farming system
    • Grid placement
    • Crop system
  • Mining system
    • Level design for the mine
  • Fishing system
    • Player animation for fishing: casting, waiting, reeling, and caught
    • Fishing minigame
  • Hunting system
    • Create animation characters
    • Bow and arrow mechanism
  • Trading/shopping/commerce system
    • Not sure how to make it interactive and fun
  • Foraging system
  • Crafting system
  • Quest system
  • Dialogue system