1st GameDev Anniversary!
One day, back in August of 2019, after spending a couple of weeks writing down copious notes on games I would like to make and how I would set them up, I decided to do something about it. I have always wanted to make video games but never knew how to get that ball rolling. After, what seemed like a lifetime of desire, I finally resolved to seriously look into it and see what it would entail.
On August 14, 2019, I put my hands on Unity for the first time. I had tooled around with games that allowed lots of freedom with level-building, and even messed around with GameMaker in the past, but I wanted to know how games were really being made. Unity seemed like the best choice for me to learn industry-level practices and I was willing to put in the work to learn how to use it. For me, this was my official start of serious game development.
Knowing it would take time to learn fundamentals, I dedicated my time to learning Unity and, later on, C# coding. I wanted to know how everything about making a game worked and wanted to be able to do it all by myself. I have no team, no partner, no collaborators. It’s just me and whatever I can accomplish by my own abilities. This period lasted about six months and was all about reading about game development, working with Unity tutorials, and learning C#.
After that six months or so, I felt running through countless tutorials and projects using pre-made assets and constructing things the way someone else prescribed was getting tiresome. I had all this creativity in me and I wanted to let it loose! I decided to do a kind of hybrid project. The Flappy Bird style of game is a basic model most newbs emulate, so why go that route? The difference for me, however, was I had made the decision to completely make all my own assets from scratch. No pre-mades, no re-skinning. I wanted my game to be artistically original.
To keep things completely original, I also chose to create my own game character. I had already settled on Illogical Bacon as the name for my game studio (a story for another time) so why not keep it themed in kind? Thus was born Flappy Pig! I started work on Flappy Pig in mid-February of 2020 and stopped working on it around the end of March, so roughly 40 days of work. I never really “completed” it, but it was a fully functional and playable game. At the point I stopped I was only thinking of features I could add to it that would be good things for me to learn, so I had randomly-generated obstacles, moving bonus pickups, sound effects, and was working on a power-up mode. I had also built in a developer god mode which made testing a lot easier. In all, I consider it a great success as a learning tool and it was all my creation!
The other, and probably main, reason I stopped working on Flappy Pig was because inspiration had struck and I had a great game idea I wanted to pursue. When you are an aspiring developer there is no shortage of ideas to develop (at least there shouldn’t be!) and I had 18 I had already come up with and outlined with some decent notes to actually get started. It was my 19th game idea, however, that got me juiced enough to feel that I could learn to build a game by actually building a game. This was the birth of Panic Room.
On March 25, 2020 I started drawing some map ideas and scribbling tons of gameplay notes. I knew how I wanted the game to play, how I wanted it set up, and had a lot of vision for what I could do with it. It has now been over four months since I undertook development of Panic Room and I have learned a lot in that short amount of time. Even looking at my code now, I can barely believe I wrote all of it! If this is what I can accomplish in this short amount of time then I can’t wait to see what the next full year of development on it can bring.
This past year has been exciting and fulfilling for me and I only wish I had started off on this path so much longer ago. I am now, though, and it’s all ahead full! Happy Game Dev-iversary to me!
