The beginning, the developer (Part 1)

Ehm, hey there. Welcome to my little game development blog. Here I will be documenting the development of a game I’m making and will hope to give some insight into the things that go into making this game.

So first, before I’ll explain what game I’m making, some information about me. I’m Yannick, age 24 and a student at the university of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. I’m currently in the process of wrapping up my graduation and will (hopefully) have my Master of Computer Science and Engineering degree by the end of March this year. I started making games in my early teens with a wonderful tool called RPGMaker 2000 and later with its successor RPGMaker 2003. This was my first experience with making games and it was my first encounter with game creating and especially scripting, which got rather good at to a point where I was replacing some of the build in systems with my own custom ones. But as knowledge grows, you seem to hit the limits of this tool. This became even more apparent when I started studying for my bachelors I acquired real programming skills and started to fiddle around with languages like Java, Action Script 3 (Flash/Flex) and Python. I would make small prototypes which were horribly slow and clunky, but these helped me progress. In the years I was messing around, I was usually starting projects and putting them away again, but I was learning some important things. First, make something you actually want to play; Breakout clones are not fun to make after a first time. And secondly, don’t make huge games (obvious right?). Too many projects (even with a team) failed because the intended end product was just to large of a scale. When the sparkle of a new project wears off, you still need to conquer this massive amount features and then the motivation begins to decline and eventually drops to zero. Which at that point the project is put on “hold” as most say, most of the time never picked up again.

However, when a project fails at least I learned something and each time I started I knew more than the last time and actually got further each time. So here I am again, stronger and better prepared than every other time and willing to see it through the end. So here is the plan, a small game with not to complicated art and a small set of features. I don’t want to spend too much time on the basis, I just want to make something playable.

Hmm, this is getting longer than expected. I’ll make two posts, so this can be archived better. Which means: The beginning, the game (Part 2).