I Want to Make a Game (and a little piece about aspirations) [Warning: Wall of Text Alert]

Yeah, this is a long, boring post, and yeah, there's no images other than the one just below this bit of text. But, hey, what can you do?

Ok, ever since I was a little child there have been so many things I've wanted to be able to do. The top 5 of this list of jobs has pretty much always looked like this (in no order):

• Author
• Musician
• Filmmaker
• Artist
• Game Designer

So, yeah, lots of artsy things on that list. I guess I just always thought the idea of being paid for doing something that gives you that super special feeling you get from using your mind to create something. I've also always wanted to give other people those same feelings that great books, movies, music, art, and games have given me.

I have yet to truly achieve any of the things on that list.

I haven't written (read: finished) any decent short stories, let alone an entire novel, even though I've spent many years trying (although it has been quite a few years since I've tried).

I might make music but I don't yet consider myself a musician, mainly because I've yet to perform music, make money (aside from here on Stemit), or create anything of any real artistic value.

I've tried writing some screenplays, but I suffer here from the same problems preventing me from being an author, although I've had some half decent ideas that I still spend time trying to figure out. But even if I managed to turn any of my ideas into a finished script, a lack of money, equipment, and people is holding me back from making a film. Interestingly, out of all of the things on that list this is the only one I've had any sort of formal education in.

Much like with music, I might make (and sometimes break) "art" (whatever that really means), I don't yet consider myself an artist, and for similar reasons to being a musician too. I'm including photography under the category of art too because photography can be artistic and out of all the arts I enjoy doing it's probably the only one that could get me somewhere close to having a show at a physical gallery. But, while I've taken lots of photographs, I haven't really taken any that I would consider artistic.

Probably the closest I've ever gotten to designing a game is using a level editor in various games I've played over the years. I was around 10 or 11 when the compulsion to make video games was strongest for me, but at some point in my early teens I kind of gave up on this dream because, well, it seemed sort of an impossible task for a dummy like me to be able to comprehend all of the coding, the programming, the technology, the maths, the... well, everything that goes into making a game. I mean, this was a time when games like Need for Speed Underground 2, GTA San Andreas, and Manhunt were being released, long gone were the days of video games being created in some dude's bedroom, even small groups producing games had been replaced with large development teams long ago, and I didn't even have a computer. So, yeah, I gave up, I decided making video games was going to be an impossibility for me.

And then indie games became popular...

With the emergence of the indie game movement my wish to create games returned to me, there was just something about these games that really captured my imagination. A little over five years ago I had started falling out of love with video games, everything felt so generic, it felt like the only thing developers were doing was rehashing the same games from the last twenty years and just making them look pretty on the new consoles. But indie games were different, they were actually trying to do something, they were novel, they were innovating in an otherwise stagnant industry. They were sacrificing graphics for gameplay mechanics, they focused more on stories, experiences, and depth than on trying to sell millions of copies, they were making art for people who wanted to find it while the big players were making products to be consumed by a mass audience.

But that's just my opinion and doesn't have any real bearing on the topic I'm trying to discuss, I mean, that little rant has completely derailed my train of thought. What was I talking about again? Oh yeah, I want to make a game, that was the whole point of this post, right? Ok, let's try get this already bloated, rambling mess of a wall of text back on track.

For the last few years I've been playing around with different programming languages for various things, and almost every time I try learning one of these languages I decide I'm going to try and code a silly little game like snake or something. So I start working through some tutorials to figure out what I need to do what I want to do, but almost every time I do this I give up after my results end up broken compared to the tutorial even though the code looks identical. Another problem I've had trying to learn this way is that I'm just following a recipe, typing out what I'm being told to type out without ever really understanding it, plus, I've never really had a programming language click with me and how my brain works (or fails to work maybe).

And then I found Godot.

Godot is an open source game engine that has helped me figure out what I've been doing wrong all this time. Every time I tried making some sort of game previously it was through nothing but code, words, phrases, lines and lines of text that ended up being completely meaningless to me because I had nothing to connect it to. What was missing was something visual, something I could interact with without having to search a wall of text to find the thing I want to change. What Godot does is allow you to put together the building blocks of your project before you need to code anything, and even when you do need to start coding the language used seems pretty straight forward and intuitive, from what I've seen so far at least.

Now, I know other game engines work this way, I'm sure Unity has a very similar system but I've always been a bit worried that Unity wouldn't work on my shitty laptop. Also, about five or six years ago I had downloaded the Unreal Development Kit, but I gave up trying to understand how to use that one long before I came to any sort of coding, plus it barely worked on the laptop I was using back then. But, yeah, Godot seems like a lightweight, fully featured environment for making games, and, while I haven't yet used it to do anything super CPU intensive, it works fine on this piece of shit laptop.

Another thing I like is that even though I've only looked at a few tutorials and haven't gotten much further than putting a little 2D pixel art sprite in a little 2D pixel art world and having it move around while the camera follows it, but I feel like I already kind of get the code being used. I'm already thinking about ways to use the few bits of code I've seen in the tutorials in my own projects, and while I don't understand it enough to be able to do that right now I do think I'll start picking it up fairly soon, and I'm already finding enough resources to help me figure out the things I know I'm going to struggle with.

And all that after only a couple of days of playing around with this thing.

Anyway, I'm going to wrap this post up now because I'm tired, lazy, and fairly certain nobody is going to read this or care about anything I've said or anything I might go on to say. But, yeah, I figure it's about time I put in some real effort into trying to make a game. I mean, I make music, I make art, and I (kind of) write, so why not cross something else off my list of childhood aspirations?

With that in mind I'm going to start a regular series where I update anyone who might be interested on my progress making a game. Hopefully, once I start getting somewhere and I'm comfortable with the process, I'll start trying to get people in the Steemit community involved with the project. The first post, or first couple of posts, in the series will probably only be about what kind of game I want to make and the kinds of ideas I hope to implement.

Alright, I'm done now, sorry this was so long, boring, messy, and sorry for not including more than one image, but, it's late, I'm tired/lazy, and I can't be arsed trying to find good images, I'm not even going to proofread/edit this mess.

Thank you for existing.

Oh... and don't ever give up on your dreams.