Okay, so this isn’t my first attempt. I actually bought justaspark.co.uk back in 2014 with a similar aim. It was only a couple of years ago that it finally expired. Well, better late than never, I suppose.
What is this for?
The purpose of this website is to document my efforts in my game development journey. Maybe some of it will be useful to others one day. But mostly, it’s for me. I want something I can look back at one day. My aim is to spend an hour or two per week writing about my progress. I expect it to be slow at first.
How did I get here?
Oh yes, a little background. My journey into the development world ‘officially’ started around 2011/2012. I don’t remember exactly how, but I taught myself how to write Java by rewriting an outdated plugin for a popular Minecraft server software, Bukkit. At the time, I didn’t have any practical experience developing, so was figuring things out as I went along.
At the time, I was finishing my education in sixth form and, like everyone around me, was deciding what to do next. Putting my computer, er ‘skills’, to good use, I enrolled on an apprenticeship for a local computer repair shop, although I quickly determined that wasn’t the sort of role for me. I ended up looking at University, and settled on applying for Plymouth University to study Computing and Games Development.
Fast-forward a few years, and I have a degree in hand (yay) and half an idea for creating a company along with a good friend I met during my time at university. Perhaps young and naive, we thought we could develop the next big thing with AI tools for designing games. Reality hit pretty hard and we ended up floundering before all but giving up on that chase. I instead turned my hand to a ‘simpler’ game, woodworking.
That was around 2016. Not a whole lot happened in the next decade. Well, plenty happened. Not much for my game development life. And then, up pops a thought from a few days ago. For no apparent reason, I get this desire to suddenly revive our long-forgotten game and ideas start coming for different concepts and mechanics that I can add.
What now?
There’s a long road ahead. I’ve been out of the development game for the best part of 10 years, and even then, I didn’t know a whole lot. Realistically, it’s going to take a lot of effort and I don’t expect quick results.
And of course, I’ll need equipment. I had a decent computer when I studied at University. 10 years on, I had the same computer. It’s showing its age, even for simple tasks, so I don’t expect much from it for creating games. Luckily, I have just a few months ago built myself a new desktop, capable of developing games. Good fortune, or maybe fate if you believe in that sort of thing.
If it’s fate, then it must be aiming to slow me down and make me re-learn the basics (I do love to get carried away) – because the power supply is faulty and the computer is just collecting dust at the moment. Well, that gives me time to think things over.
Cool story, but what now?
Right now, I have three main objectives. They are nice and simple:
- Work out the details about what this game might be
- Learn the systems it’ll need to make happen
- Document my progress
Well, I’m doing okay on one of those counts. I’ve written this much, so far. Tick.
For detailing out what the game might be, I have a plan. I need to write it out, otherwise I’ll end up getting distracted by the first interesting, but ultimately meaningless challenge I come across (thinking back to when I spent several weeks saving 2500ms on a procedural generation algorithm – useful, sure, but it ran once per game run.) I’ll start by using a mind map to quickly jot down ideas in an organised fashion, and link them together. I can expand this later into a more detailed write-up.
And for learning systems, well, it’s a case of decide what game engine to use, learning how to use it, and then creating the systems needed to put the game together.
Sounds simple, right? Of course it won’t be. Seems like a good start to me.