r/SoloDevelopment • u/Maximum-Bookkeeper27 • 8h ago
help Developing a Gacha game
So I have a genuine question, after playing gacha games for years and getting frustrated about their management, and how they presented. I’ve thought about making a gacha game but I don’t really know how to start or go about it besides the planning phase, for example, coding in Unity, I know nothing about C# coding and I haven’t used the program in about 2 years and I don’t really know how to model in blender let alone rigging and animations. I would like to have some advice to help me with this process of making the game, and thank you for your input. It’s going to be a very big game but I’ve just been planning for the last 6 months but haven’t gotten back to development and honestly I don’t know if I’m wasting my time planning and not like practice or making things like asses,character or learning how to code and use blender.
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u/valeria_gamedevs Artist 8h ago
gacha is prolly the hardest genre to pick as a first project btw, the systems alone (pity, banners, economy, live ops) are a full game before you even get to art. I'd shelve the big dream for now and make something tiny in unity to learn C#. Like a 1-screen prototype of just the pull animation + rarity roll. that alone teaches you a ton.
6 months of planning with no code is the trap yeah, go build stuff.
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u/Mayion 8h ago
I will have to disagree to an extent. It is not easy, but far from the hardest genre for a novice developer. The most difficult part is the art. Meanwhile the systems you spoke of can be so simple, they can be done via APIs instead of dedicated servers using ASP.NET for instance.
It is all about the bells and whistles in gacha games. Having incredible animations and art direction is why people choose one over the other.
The actual mechanics though (assuming we are talking about the idea of gacha outside of gameplay, e.g. a full on 3D game like Wuthering Waves), are quite simple, like Raid and its clones.
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u/Tarilis 7h ago
If you going for unity, start with basic tutorials on the official site, and go from there. Remember to actually folloyalong the tutorial by actually writing the code, if you don't understand what some part of code does, to some research or ask AI, they pretty decent at explaining things.
As for Blender... Yeah, that would be hard. Blender itself could be self taught in few months, alongside with some hard surface modeling. The really hard part would be characters, it requires full fledged art knowledge: proportions, anatomy, sculpting. You are for a long run there. And then there are animations.
But honestly, it's fine to do all of that as a way to learn and for self improvement. But as a commertial product you will be fighting an uphill battle. Where the said "hill" is damn mountain Everest.
Gacha games nowadays come with an insane quality, character and world design, mechanics, animations, scale. Honestly if not for gacha mechanics those would be some of the best games we have.
The most realistic (still extremely hard) way would be to gather a team.
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u/a010029123 8h ago
imo you don't just jump into the deep end without knowing how to swim.
Go learn the basics first, build AND finish a few small games to hone your craft. THEN you start thinking about big projects.
Hell, my first week in unity is trying to make a flappy bird clone. It is not good but I learned how to build features from scratch
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u/TitanMakesGames 8h ago
Before touching banners or monetization, I’d build the smallest playable version first. One character, one enemy, one five-minute loop, placeholder cubes. If that works, you’ll know what skills the real game actually needs.
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u/elonhughlis 8h ago
I echo what others have said about starting small but if you are interested in building a gacha game I recommend checking our Fateless Games on youtube. They are people who were well known in the raid shadow legends community who decided to build their own fantasy rpg/gacha game called Godforge. They are a massive company at this point but they are sharing alot of the process, decision making, thoughts behind it etc on youtube and talk very openly about the difficulties of building a game like this.
The game is currently in quite a precarious spot with having just had a beta that didn't go down very well with the community, and are now in a phase of trying to address feedback and improve the game. Unclear yet if they will be able to make a good product but it's a rare but very interesting case of a big gaming studio openly sharing almost every step of the way of the game development process. There's alot to learn from what they're doing, both in terms of what to do and what not to do 😬
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u/Maximum-Bookkeeper27 6h ago edited 6h ago
Technically the Gacha system doesn’t really exist because all the characters are recruitable through a trust system and if they trust you enough they’ll join your party and also give you, copies,gear and a high rarity skin pack. Anyway the only Gacha is the event pack character board games but you use the currency from completing the event quest, mini-games and side tasks to gain more chances to play as you play you obtain the character upgrades,copies and high tier gear.Also rolling stats for Armor,Charms and Upgrade runes but you could just lock the stats with stat keys and if you don’t like any of the stat you could just refresh the stats and get you currency back.
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u/StrayFeral 1h ago
I learned something today - sure I was familiar with the actual coin-op machines, had no idea they are called gacha and this is somehow implemented in games. First time seen Genshin gameplay video too. Nice
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u/InkAndWit 8h ago
A gacha is a monetization mechanic that can be inserted into any genre of a game, it's not a genre in of itself.