Not walking through anymore. Now making

The dawn of another year (not a decade yet) is the best time to start something new. I say that now because the subject of this website, and correspondingly, my status with gaming, is changing. I am going to shift focus from developing long and incredibly time-consuming walkthroughs to making games (which, will be short but also incredibly time consuming to make).

I haven't been hired at some fancy company, I didn't join a hyper-creative indie studio, and I didn't team up with a thoughtful solo coder. It is just me. I just got shot by the indie development cupid and have become entirely infatuated with the thought of creating my own games and, most appealingly, getting someone else play something that I created.

I am not embarking on this change as some sort of fool-hearty lark that I will abandon in two weeks. I do have a computer science degree that I haven't been using. I understand the elements of good design and I do have a side interest in usability. And I have made a few quasi games - one of the in BASIC. Why not?

Up until now, I always told myself that I wasn't interested in developing games because making something worth playing would require me to sell my youth to a mega-corporation and spend endless crunch-time hours programming pixel shaders. Whatever those are. However, in the past couple of years I found that I have been playing more and more short, low-fidelity games and enjoying them much more than the mega-budget, triple-A titles. Games like Pac-man CE, Geometry Wars, and Braid seem as if they could be built by one, or at least a couple, of really dedicated people. Those games show that you can turn an idea into something tangible and you can do it without the burden of writing a story that nobody cares about or rendering a bulging homunculus in Maya. Plus I realized that I am only using about 1/3 of the college education that I worked so hard to get.

Here is the plan. Part A is education. Last week I started in a my first classes at the local community college: a C++ class to make up for my Java-only university education, and a Game Design 101 class. C++ is a cold, online only experience that I suspect is actually a Turing test. I will prod it into submission next week when I turn in my first assignment. Will report any findings. The design class is taught by a 60s-ish German man who is an ex-physicist turned graphic designer. He admitted that he doesn't play games anymore but I think his knowledge in technology and digital design could be useful.

Part B is to make as many games as possible. A number of years ago I read this GameDev article titled "How do I Make Games? A Path to Game Development" and have think about it regularly. The approach is simple. First, you program the most basic game: Tetris. Then you code Breakout, followed by Pac-man, and finally, Super Mario. Along the way you learn all the basics, collision detection, AI, side scrolling, and so on. It is learning by doing.

Since I won't be spending my writing time on walkthroughs, I am going to blog a lot more. I will occasionally write about games I am playing but it will mostly be about the games I am making. I will probably write some tutorials. I think articles like Metanet's interactive and super-detailed explanation of how they programmed the collision detection in N+ is incredible. I want to try to write something like that.

So, stay posted, this blog could turn into a dev diary at any moment....