prologue
"We did this not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy."Making games is hard. It encompasses many different disciplines that are each careers in their own right. In game development you're a designer, a programmer, an animator, a modeler, a composer, a sound designer -- and, I'm afraid, this list is just the tip of the iceberg.
No surprise, then, that someone interested in game development might see this workload and decide to turn around. I've dropped and picked up 'game dev' too many times to count. Maybe I found it overwhelming, or maybe I was just following the whim of my interests. Either way, I've amassed a wasteland of unfinished projects on my hard drives: tech demos, environmental demos, random little simulations -- they pepper my project folders like the barnacles on a boat heading nowhere. But looking back, each abandoned project taught me something new, and a vector of progress seems to appear from the chaos.
My first foray into 'game development' was making maps in Hammer for CounterStrike: Source. I picked up GameMaker 8, and over the course of 10 years I moved from engine to engine. GameMaker Studio, GameMaker Studio 2, Unity, and finally Godot. I was always making music and visual art during this time, and I'd pick up each interest whenever I felt the inspiration to dive in. It would seem I've been in 'game development boot camp' without entirely being aware of it.
A window to the wasteland
Some projects and prototypes throughout the years
Fishing environmental test, GameMaker Studio, 2015.
Cell simulation, GameMaker Studio, 2018.
"Scatterbrink", GameMaker Studio 2, 2019.
"Snake", Godot, 2024.