Coffee.....I need Coffee

Who I be and What I do

I've been into computer games ever since my early days on an Atari 2600 (not mine it belonged to a neighbour). But Monkey Island 2 on the Amiga was the game that really made me sit up and take notice. (Even though it did come on 12 floppy disks). For the past year or two I've been attempting to make games solo in my limited free time and consequently I spent more time reading about games and learning how to make them than actually playing them.

Why start a blog?

It seems like all the cool kids are writing blogs these days. So being a fat,middle aged game obsessed Irish dad its time I started mine. I've found game dev blogs to be a mine of great technical information and background info. It is very useful hearing about other indies and their experiences and so I want to share mine. I find writing about my game ideas helps to organise my thoughts and clear my head. Much like a less magical pensieve. I find sometimes as I'm writing about an idea I've had it allows me to evaluate it from a more detached perspective. For example it was only while writing about my commando cyborg unicorn (equipped with sunglasses and side mounted dual gauss cannons) idea that I realised that it probably.....needs some work!

Where to start?

First things first I needed to choose a game engine/framework to learn and develop with. I didn't want to start straight off with a 3D MMO space marine match three game. I thought it best to start in 2D and build something very straightforward. Plus my development pc isn't massively powerful. That lead me to look at the mobile platforms to develop on. Developing on IOS meant I would need to pay about 200 euro developer registration fee and I think I actually needed a mac to publish games from, plus Id want an IOS device to test on.
Android development seemed much more accessible. I just need a pc to develop on, an android device (of which I had two) and pay a 20 euro developer fee. The choice was clear. Android all the way. Now don't get me wrong, I'd love to develop for IOS. There are definite advantages: there are set screen sizes/density's,concrete hardware specs and consumers spend much more money on the appstore than on the play store. But I didn't want to outlay so much cash just on as a hobbyist.

First Steps

I came across a great book called Beginning Android Games by Mario Zechner. It walks through the creation of a basic game framework for android. From there I moved up to his libgdx engine. I built and released a basic jumping game and a kids memory matching game. I thought then that I was ready. I could write my own riff on an FTL style game for android, make a fortune and resign from my day job in the most disgustingly over the top way way imaginable. Needless to say that didn't happen.
The amount of work needed was not something I had expected. What might seem like a relatively simple game to create takes massive amounts of design,planning and assets not to mention learning all the systems required to actually implement the thing. I was quite disheartened and left the project gather dust on a shelf.

What I learned

That failed project taught me a valuable lesson about scope and what I could realistically do given my time constraints,learning requirements and artistic ability. Take for example an enemy in a 3D game. This might sound obvious but an enemy typically will have at a minimum a 3D model, textures,animations,sounds and artificial intelligence. That enemy will need to interact with the environment,player and other enemies etc in a meaningful fashion. Thats a helluva lot of work for one person. I would need to go and learn 3DS Max or Blender to create the model of the enemy, photoshop/GIMP for texturing and so on. That single element of a game isn't exactly a trivial task especially if you are making games while holding down a full time job/family life etc.
So the moral of the story is to start off building small, polished games. Don't attempt making a Mass Effect GTA hybrid as your first project. Keep building your smaller games, layering more complexity as you go.