Hello! My name is Timothy and I’m a hobbyist game developer. In this blog I’ll be writing about my journey and process making indie games, as well as talking about game design in general and examining specific games that interest me.
My aim is for my writing format to be accessible to you if you are not a game developer or enthusiast,
My Game Dev Journey
I’ve been interested in game design for as long as I can recall; when I was a kid I remember drawing scenes from imaginary games I wanted to make on paper with pencil. I got started actually putting functional prototypes together when I was around 11 or 12 when I started learning the WarCraft 3 map editor. After several years of making custom maps for me and my internet friends to play together, I took a lengthy hiatus and focused mainly on tabletop RPGs. During this time I became obsessed with Dungeons & Dragons as well as indie RPGs like Fiasco and Microscope. Although I did develop a few systems of my own, I was never happy enough with any of them to call them finished.
It was only during the COVID-19 pandemic that I finally returned to video game development. I had bounced off of the Unity game engine once or twice in the past, having found it labyrinthine and intimidating, but with nothing but time on my hands due to quarantine I followed some tutorials on YouTube, dusted off my Computer Science education from college, and got to work.
Heeding the advice of pretty much every game dev out there, I started very small. My first project was a side-scrolling shoot-em-up that never got a name. It had one type of enemy, one type of healing pickup, and a boss that was just a bigger, faster version of the normal enemies. It had no AI beyond the enemies bouncing from one end of the screen to the other, shooting blindly once per second. It had no audio of any kind and could be beaten in about 2 or 3 minutes. But most importantly, it was a completed project under my belt and, for my first non-mod game project, I was even proud of it.
With that all-important first hurdle conquered, I was hooked. I dove into a more ambitious project which I eventually finished and published on itch.io under the title Containment Breach. I will be writing a post-mortem of Containment Breach as one of my first few posts on this blog, because I have a lot to say about it and the things I learned while making it. It’s free to download, so give it a shot and tell me what you think!
The main function of this blog is to keep me motivated and to chart my progress, both for myself and for anyone who is interested. I hope you enjoy reading my ramblings as much as I enjoy making and talking about games. See you ’round!
