Preface
I'm creating this blog as a historical record of the game I'm about to start developing. If I finish the game I hope this blog will provide value to other aspiring game developers. If I don't finish the game, it will immortalize my failure, probably without anyone even ever having read it. I'm hoping for the former. :)
My Backstory
I've known I wanted to make games since I was 9 years old. I remember being in 3rd grade and drawing characters and weapons for a non-existent RPG on notebook paper in class. I was making a game. I had no idea how games were actually made but I figured if you came up with a list of characters and weapons, and a story, you were probably most of the way there. I had gotten my first game console, a Sega Genesis, several years earlier. I was a fairly serious gamer from that point into my adulthood.
Later, in 7th grade, I picked up what I believe was probably the first or second edition of Sams Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours. That seemed like as good a way as any to start making games. I read several hundred grueling pages before realizing that at the end of that book I would have no idea how to make a graphical program of any sort, much less the kinds of games I had in mind.
My next major attempt was sometime in high school, when I discovered QBasic. I could finally get graphics on the screen! After toying around with things like overlapping circles that cycled through ALL 16 of the colors I knew how to use, I went on to create what is to this day the most complete game I've ever created.
It was a game only its developer could love. But it had all the essential elements: A splash screen and menu, a sound on/off option, background music, a sound effect, and a goal. The goal, after answering the prompt "What score would you like to play to?", was to roll a pair of virtual dice the fewest number of times possible to reach that score. The game even showed the dice "roll" (two squares with the appropriately positioned dot(s) in them). The game would inform you how many rolls it had taken you when you reached that score and ask if you'd like to play again. Of course there was no skill involved, so the replay factor was 0, and if you were smart you'd say no. I think the only people that saw that game were myself and my parents. I was probably 16 or 17 at the time.
In a little over two weeks I'll be 34. I've dabbled in game development quite a bit over the years, from a two-quarter stint in the Game Design curriculum at ITT Technical College, to participating in a couple of game jams, to a Coursera course or two, to reading a LOT of articles and books on game design and development, to just playing around in Unity3D.. but I've never come anywhere near delivering a completed game.
I've beaten myself up over that quite a lot and gave up on the idea for many years, multiple times. But every time I ask myself what I want to do with my life, "make games" is always the immediate answer. So I'm getting back up on the horse again.
20th Time's a Charm?
I'll admit after so many false starts it's a bit hard to be optimistic about my chances this time around. Luckily I do have a few things in my favor these days.
Firstly, while I haven't gotten as far as I'd like with game programming, I've actually gotten pretty good at general programming, having worked with friends on several reasonably completed side projects, and eventually landing a job at Delta Airlines as a software developer (after a little over a year there I am currently a Senior Front End Developer).
Secondly, my most recent forays into game dev have been some of my most serious. I worked on my most recent game for several months before giving up because it wasn't going to be marketable (it was a text adventure).
Lastly, I've learned something new with each attempt. Almost every time until the last the lesson was "you're still trying to do too much". So with each game idea, I reduced the complexity more, until I ended up working on the aforementioned text adventure.
One major problem I have been running into since starting to scope down my ideas is that if the game is too simple I find it boring and lose interest. Once I decided I was going to attempt this again, I knew I needed to be careful about what I set my sights on. It needed to be something I could develop on my own, in my spare time (evenings and weekends), in a reasonable time-frame (6-12 months). It also needed to be marketable, because I wanted there to at least be a chance that it would sell well enough to allow me to quit my job and make games full-time.
I had several game ideas I was passionate about and would love to make but they didn't fit those criteria for various reasons.But I didn't want to rush into anything so I decided to just spend my time reading a game design book (The Art of Game Design, 3e) until inspiration struck. It took about two weeks, but this morning I woke up at 2 a.m. with a sliver of a game idea in my head. I laid there for a few minutes fleshing out the idea, and soon realized it was a good fit! I jumped out of bed, grabbed my laptop, and started taking notes.
I eventually went back to bed, but when I woke up, I found I was still excited about the idea, and ready to get started on it (man, I love that feeling). And that brings us more or less to the here and now. I'll go into more detail about the new idea in my next post.
