Rough Start

Well… I certainly didn’t get to where I wanted this week. In fact, I didn’t get very far at all. I imagine this won’t be an uncommon occurrence for these projects though. But I digress…

Ideas

I have a few ideas for games I’ll be slowly working to develop. I already made some significant progress on one of them prior to the creation of Random Worlds Studio, but I have switched gears to starting work on a bit simpler of an idea that will probably make for a better first release goal.

Experience

I have no educational experience with game development, nor professional. I have a BS in Math and Physics and an MS in Electrical Engineering. Video games have been a large part of my life for many years. Going into development was always a dream of mine, but I never thought to really try my hand, nor did I imagine I could find a job in the industry since I’ve never lived anywhere with a connection to the entertainment industry. With ever-increasing virtual connectivity in the world, that makes less and less of a difference, so I’ve decided it’s time to dip my toes in.

I will be learning as I go via online tutorials and reading documentation. As I am not experienced with a particular engine yet, I chose to start off learning to use Godot as it is free and open source, both of which are major bonuses to me. I don’t want to spend money for developing in a game engine if this is going to just remain mostly a hobby. And I have been a supporter of open source software in some capacity for as long as I can remember being interested in computers.

Development Progress

On the note of development, as mentioned earlier, I did not get nearly as much done as I hoped this week. I made a basic menu! Not even worthy of sharing a screenshot, but well… here it is anyway. I’m not planning to worry much about how the games look to begin with. The focus will be on functionality over form initially. Though if I’m being completely honest, I find simplistic interfaces quite appealing. There is a fine line between simplistic and bland, however. I will eventually aim toward the former.

While I haven’t used them much for this new game yet, I have found 16BitDev’s tutorial videos quite useful. They’re short and to the point, which I appreciate for tutorial videos. Check them out!

Next Week

I hope to make much more progress next week. Hopefully I can get a basic game running, and from there I’ll start implementing the more complex features I have planned. Also, perhaps I will get some semblance of project pages posted for my game ideas.

Until next time…