This is my development blog. Who am I? I’m some guy you have probably never heard of. I’ve been lurking around the internet with this name since the late ’90s, but I tend to keep to myself. So let me tell you a little bit about myself.
I love games. Board games, tabletop games, card games, video games, there isn’t a type of game that I don’t like. I have been fascinated with structure of games since I was a small child. When asked I always told adults that I wanted to make games when I grew up, and I still dream of supporting myself and my family by making games.
I also love to write code. I write code at work, I write code at home, I think about code, I dream about code. Making the computer dance at my whim makes me giddy. When I took my first programming class in high school I felt like I was finally learning what I needed to make that dream a reality. It’s only natural, then, that I have been writing my own games ever since.
In the past I have made games for myself. I would get an idea for a game, put together the engine and work out all the bugs, make some small amount of content to test it in, and then move on the next challenge. Making a game engine was fun, but level design seemed tedious, and I’m not much of a writer. How do you balance an entire game by yourself? This has left me with little to show for over a decade of game development. I know it isn’t likely that I’ll get a job at a major game developer, and from what I’ve heard about the working conditions there I’m not sure I even want that, so I was fine with having my own personal collection of fun little demos.
Over the years I have toyed with the idea of starting an independent game studio. But as much as I love games and coding, I hate business. Managing the business aspect of an independent game company sounds about as far from fun as I can imagine. Turning something that I love into a chore didn’t seem like a good idea, so when it has come up in the past I just let it die.
About a year ago I started work on a project that was different from everything else I’ve done. It was a mod for another game. I didn’t have to work on the graphics or collision detection, no storage format optimizations or interface tweaking. All I had to do was take the gameplay ideas I had and shove them into the system. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. I was starting at the point where I would usually lose interest in a project, and I realized that finishing the project completely wasn’t as tedious or annoying as I thought it would be. Once I got over that hump I decided that I would try and actually release this mod, and in future projects I would aim for making an actual game I could share with people.
I am coming close to finishing what I set out to do, and some of the people I know have expressed interest in the project so I thought I would set up this blog to keep people abreast of the projects I am working on. I am going to use this space to post details of the projects I am working on, I have some good ideas that I plan to put to code once this project is out, so there should hopefully be some interesting stuff here for you soon enough.
