Today I decided to start writing a game development blog for my game dev adventure. Although I started writing games way back in 2015, a lot of things have happened between my personal and work life, which impacted how much time I could afford to spend on game development. I began this journey with only a little bit of programming background so I wasn't able to get through enough tutorials on Unity to be able to create even the most simple game. I nearly gave it up then because game development is not easy, but I never want failure defines who I am; I decided to stick with it a little longer and continue to learn individual game development concepts while trying to create new game samples, so I continue on and on... At first, I played around and tried to create a little Unity 2D space-shooter game. It was crappy! Just having enemies flying down from the top, and have a ship going everywhere and shoot at things. That was all it does.
Through the experience of creating my first game sample, I of course realize how terrible I am at writing games (DUH!). Instead of continuing to improve the same game, I decided to start another game from scratch, using all the skills I learned so far to try to create something even better. I thought: "I HAVE LEARNT ENOUGH, TIME FOR THE NEXT PROJECT!"... Little did I know that everything isn't as easy as I thought.
While I was working on my own games, I joined a group, Polycarbon Games, in April 2017, to work on Zen Block, a mobile game to be released on both android and ios. It gave me lots of valuable experience in dealing with different types of assets as well as further studying new ways of writing codes to get great performance on applications. Thanks to the opportunity, I became a better game developer myself and honed my skills even faster than ever before.
Later in 2017, I spent about 3 months working on a tower defense game called Guardian of the wild. In August, I finished the prototype, and decided to showcase it at one of the Playcrafting Global Game Night in San Francisco. It was fun! Having people trying out a game I write brings me so much joy. Even though I know the product I made has lots of flaws and needed many improvements, I still get super excited when I see people experiencing the game I created.
Reflecting on all the comments and feedback I received from all the players in the Expo, I became aware that there are many more flaws and the lack of functionality in the game including a major defect which I had to fix: Screen scale between devices! I never knew how terrible the screen scale is before someone pointed it out to me. Following several days of researching on the topic, I realized I had to start the project from square 1 if I want different devices and resolutions to all work for the game. From then on, I knew I still lack many of the necessary skills I have to be writing good games, so I put the tower defense game on hold for development and decided to work on few other game prototypes to fine-tuned all of my skill-sets. The year 2017 was the deciding factor in my game development career. All the failures just made me even more passionate about wanting to create better games in the future! More story about the past... to be continued~ If you like what you read, please share this post, subscribe to our mailing list, follow our social media pages, and join our discord channel! Thank you, and until next time!
Have Fun. Be Happy. Be Inspirational!
Post featured photo by Frantisek Duris on Unsplash