A stopping point to look back.

Hello everyone,

I have been an amateur gamedev for approximately a year, and this post is made to reflect on my journey as a developer, how I started, how I came to releasing my first game, how I went downhill in the second and whats in the future for me.

The Start

Before  late September 2020, I never really knew what I was going to be doing, the only thing I had was an interest of computers, the magic devices that run everything from the phones we use, the TVs we watch at home, the PC that i'm currently typing on, etc. Entering Form 4, September 2019 was when we were introduced to coding, it was definitely a moment, while everyone thought "well all I can do is make a screen tell me 'HELLO WORLD' and thats it", I saw that if you knew how to code, you can run the world's technology as we know it. This would be the begining of me seeing the oppurtunities that can open up for me, things never really changed besides my skill to code in PASCAL, that was when I saw a particular video from a creator I watched for some time.

The Lightbulb Moment

Boris is a man from <Unknown>, somewhere in Eastern Europe. He has a variety of videos from Travelling, Cooking, Gaming and many others, but one type of video he does from time to time, is Coding.

Before this video came out I always had the impression that to do something like Game Development, you would need a crazy powerful rig to do that, this video proved me wrong. I also thought that you would have to make your own program to make your own games, once again this video proved me wrong. This is where I decided "I'm just going to do it". I went ahead and downloaded Unity 5.6.7 on my laptop, only because it was the same version he was using in the video. I started by following his steps almost exactly, then I changed the code slightly, (N.B. this was my first time seeing C#, I wasnt familiar with the syntax so it took alot of learning, but I did learn everything about C# as a language before the next big leap in my adventure). From there I looked at the examples given by Unity, looked up many different videos on how to do things in Unity. This is also where I found Brackeys, while the channel is now inactive its still a great guide in Game Development. This was all happening, and then a post on Reddit showed up.

The Newcomer turned Medalist

I just remember turning on my phone to see a recommended post on r/TrinidadandTobago, "Upcoming game jam for Caribbean developers (and diaspora too!)", it said. The notification immediately caught my eye and I went right in, I left a comment on the post, joined the Discord server and I found myself in a community of various people from all over the Caribbean (altough the majority are Trinidadians) who specialise in everything you need in a game, from Audio, Art, Coding, Design, etc..

Come December 5th and my first game Jam would start, this would be Jammin's Second year while the host, Msanatan was still working out how to structure Jams hence why we knew what the theme was way before it started but I decided to approach the Jam as if it was a regular Game Jam and start planning as it started.

My mind immediately jumped to some sort of Maze game with enemies, since at the time I would try to make a version of "The World's Hardest Game". And that is exactly what I ended up doing. While it was basic, it was somewhat fun. Looking back at the creation as I am now, I can see where I could have done something a lot better, either way I would become the one to get the first prize just because I had something the other 2 games didn’t have, Audio (the fact I won by Audio is insane even looking back because up till today, Audio is still my weak point, and although the runner up, hsaka would become tied with me after one of the judges looked over the scores, but it was decided both of us would get appropriate cash prizes along with the more valuable Arduboy, despite this the de facto winner was me).

I don’t remember what I did with the $50US I won (I like to think I spent all of it on KFC), but I do remember opening the Arduboy on the same day I collected it from Msanatan and immediately jumping to making my first program for it, a very basic Rock Paper Scissors game in C++. While I don’t have the file, I remember looking at it with a better understanding of “Program formatting”, while the code was functional, the way I wrote it would probably make me throw up if I saw it today (but hey we all learn). I also remember how easy it was for me to learn C++, since I knew it and C# was similar, I leaned mostly on my knowledge of C# to make these programs and learnt what set C++ apart from other languages.

Being Lazy for Round 2

The second game Jam was just a nice rollercoaster. Coming up to the Jam, I was studying for the upcoming CSEC examinations. At the time, everybody was voting for the Jam to be… right in the middle of my exams? I didn’t want to miss out on the fun considering there were more competitors. Luckily the exams were pushed back 3 weeks, this would allow me to participate with 2 weeks left for studying, as the Jam started, I came right up to another problem, my skills didn’t improve much from last time. I decided to recycle assets from Monochrome Mazes, remake sprites, and make new code to fit the theme on the fly.

When the results were released, I realised I overestimated where my game would be. I expected to be at most 3rd place, I ended up being 6th place out of 11 games, At least I didn’t come last but I definitely had a lot of room to improve, as pointed out by Jesse aka Lyndon Street, the music’s volume could have definitely been lower and the sprites could have definitely been much better. The difficulty curve could have been smoother and the levels themselves could have used a lot more detail in how the levels were structured.

What’s next?

As 2022 is slowly approaching with me getting used to school life in Form 6 during COVID-19, while I decided to take a slightly different direction with the subjects I picked to study, I’m not letting go of Game Development anytime soon, with many events occurring across the world as time goes forward, there are many opportunities to change the world for the better (A new Elon Musk perhaps?). While I can’t do anything right now, the only thing I can do for the while is Game Development.

Indie games are becoming much more popular nowadays since large companies are getting greedy, putting less effort into making games people can enjoy and putting more emphasis on squeezing as much money from customers as possible whether through clickbait or microtransactions, *cough*, EA, Activision, Rockstar and many others. At least Valve is still with us.

Either way, I have a few ideas for games with more coming every other day that can change the Game Development industry for time to come. Hopefully these can come to life, and be as successful as I envision them.