How I’m going about this

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I’m trying a bunch of stuff right now. I cannot spend the rest of my life working in the corporate world or part of someone else’s vision. I know the sort of life I want to lead:

• To be able to work independently (mostly).
• Me and my work are the primary factors that determines my success or failure.
• The ability to work on what I want.

Now to get into a position where this is my reality is another thing. One path I see is to make games. It is one of many things that can meet the above criteria. There are some examples of success in this field that I can look to as guidance (Concerned Ape & Stardew Valley). Now this isn’t the first time I’ve tried something like this. I tried this around 10 years ago, but ultimately did’t get anywhere with it. I think the main reason for that was because in that stage of my life I lacked the discipline and knowledge of myself to pursue things to completion. Since then I’ve grown a lot as a person and know that I can give this the effort it deserves. In addition to this I’ve also done more planning and research about this topic and believe I know how to go about pursuing success in this world.

The Plan:

1. Pick a game engine. (1 day)
2. Make some arcade games to learn (1 month)
3. Try make a game of your own (2 month)
4. profit?

This is my plan for now. The timings are just a guide I’ve made based on my incredibly lacking experience, I expect things to change.

Specifics and the choices I’ve made

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Game Engine

I’ve decided to use Godot. There are a number of problems I have with it, the lack of code obfuscation is the main one but there are some others too. Nevertheless I’m going to use it because it’s, beginner friendly, feature rich, open source and the fact that there are plenty of tutorials available.

Arcade Game

I’m going to start with Pong! Here’s the tutorial I’ll follow

Some time later…

Wow that tutorial was really good! I feel like I actually learnt a lot. I can do a lot more as a result of following that tutorial. If you want to go to try out the game I made try this: Pong recreation

I’ll be honest, this isn’t actually the only tutorial I followed. I also tried these tutorials by the famous Brackeys: 2D games in Godot and Programming in Godot

I didn’t really get that much out of those Brackeys tutorials. I not super sure why that is. Perhaps it was just too much stuff at once and also I spent a long time on it so there was a lot of time between game dev sessions.

So What’s Next?

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I’ve thought about what to do next. There are a number of things that I could try. I think it would be a mistake to go all the way and make a 3d game or even a 2d platformer or something. I can see myself getting stuck and spending ages on something like that and losing my love for making games. I could make another arcade style game (think brick break or space invaders) without a tutorial. Right now another thing that excites me is converting pong into some sort of incremental game. With upgrades and synergies, perhaps some additional para-social story. This seems fun.