Unity beginner: Where do I start with this project?

Hello everyone,

I just started developing in Unity and my first non-tutorial project will be an android game that simulates the healing mechanics used in traditional MMOs. It's not meant to actually be put on the play store any time soon, but I want it to be my first goal while learning mobile development with Unity.

However, due to just having started I am a bit overwhelmed by the sheer learning material available. Therefore I wanted to quickly outline what my project will be about in the hope that some of the more experienced users can tell me:

• What foundations will this project need? I.e. what should I learn to quickly get productive?

• What could be beginner mistakes that I should try to prevent?

• What are the more complex obstacles I need to overcome for this to work?

If this is the wrong place, I am very sorry. Feel free to tell me where it should be instead.

Any help in structuring the project is greatly appreciated. I study computer science and have done some programming in different environments before, but I am new to the intricacies of game development in general. I have done both tutorial projects on the unity learning website, but not much else. (Roll-A-Ball with support for accelerometer controls and the Stealth game on a pc environment only)

Basically the game should look like this:

• The game is 2d and there is only one scene with a static camera

• On the screen there are some health meters, which the user can click on. Clicking selects the target to be healed. These health meters represent players

• With a selected target you can click on some buttons which represent the heal spells. Clicking a heal spell button starts a short timer visible to the player (the "cast bar") and once that finishes the selected player is healed for a certain amount. There can be spells which fire off instantly, thus requiring no castbar.

• At the top, there is an image and another health bar representing the boss creature.

And the gameplay should be like this:

• The boss attacks at varying intervals. Attacks can be simple and just target one player or could target multiple or all players. Attacks will vary a lot and be quite dynamic to make thematic boss fights possible

• Keeping your units alive enables them to damage the boss. Each unit has a certain damage-per-second property. Each second or so, the boss loses health equal to the combines dps of all units alive

• It's the players task to make sure that at least one unit survives the fight. The player is also represented by a health bar. When he dies, the heal interface will be locked but the battle will continue until everyone is dead.

• The player needs to manage his mana pool, a kind of energy that depletes by using heal spells but will quickly regenerate over time. The perfect balance point is that the player should heal just enough to make sure everyone lives in the end. That can be established by selecting efficient heals whenever possible and prioritizing in target selection.

• There should be support for mechanics like "This attack deals damage to one unit and every adjacent unit", with adjacent defined as being next to it on the healthbar screen. Other examples for this: A spell that places a buff on a unit that reads "The next time this unit receives damage, the unit is healed for . Then jumps to the unit with the lowest health. Can jump up to 4 times. Lasts 20 seconds each time." or "Heals the 5 units with the current lowest health for x".

menu design:

• An intro screen

• A level selection that loads the respective boss battle

• Some kind of customization of abilities

• a boss guide section explaining the encounter with tips and tricks

• A spellbook which contains all healing spells. The player is allowed to bring up to eight spells. Placement of these is to be determined.

Later on these things would be nice to have and I want to have these in mind from the beginning:

• Positive and negative effects (buffs and debuffs) the units can have that have some kind of duration or last indefinitly. They should be visible in some fasion to the player and be highly dynamic. They can be simple, e.g. enhancing a units dps for 10 seconds or quite complicated like "This unit looses health equal to 10% of his maximum health every 3 seonds. This effect lasts until the unit is healed above 90% of it's maximum health."

• Scaling difficulty in some way

• Making the thing pretty, e.g. animations for boss abilities, projectiles that fly from the health bars to the boss, sound effects, music.

I highly appreciate any input on any of the points, so I can create a roadmap for this project with many subgoals. Feel free to link some resources if you can think of any that would be helpful.