I'm Making a Game

Yesterday was my last day at my job as a Junior Developer at Chalk and Wire, deciding to quit and then the actual process of trying to finish everything before leaving proved to be a pretty long and arduous process which explains why my Github account has been so quiet despite certain promises. While choosing to leave a steady job is never as easy as you think it's going to be the prospect of suddenly having the time to explore some of your (too) many projects, ideas, and plans and make them into a reality is just about the most liberating thing you can get as a nerd with a keyboard.

To that end I'm quitting my job to make my first game intended for public consumption. I specify public consumption because in high school I used to have quite the prolific portfolio of text adventures as written by the weird goth kid who sat in the back corner of your English class. Additionally, due to a comedy of tragedies, I was permitted to drop my 6th period religion class (Catholic high school, this was edgy) and would sit in various stairwells with the laptop I had bought with my extremely lucrative bookstore job and happily tapped away at learning pygame. I was certain I was seconds away from a career as a famous novelist-game-developer-philosopher, I just had to hurry before my case of perfectionism went terminal. Obviously since then things have changed a wee bit, but I don't think I'm ever going to get to the point where I don't need to create things.

So, here I am.

Picking one idea out of my brood was certainly a challenge, it got a bit Sophie's Choice towards the end. Eventually I decided I needed to pick the idea that required the fewest art assets, a pragmatic choice, because despite the fact that I do like to draw I'm still at the level where I need to remind myself that I like to draw because the finished product is not its own reward. I will eventually need to hire an artist and I think a few months into unemployment I'll be really glad that I was conservative in this regards.

As to the game pitch, it seems a bit unfair to detail it here in text because I cannot properly give it without awkwardly waving my arms like a swan being assaulted on all fronts by yellow jackets but I'll try. My game is a heavily story driven (quelle surprise) stealth game set in the late 1940s wherein you (you dashing protagonist, you) are accused of a murder and you must sneak into, and around a house to find evidence to exonerate yourself. As you start to uncover what has happened in this house, and why you were framed you may find that things begin to get a little "fucky" (technical term). As of right now, I think the game will be developed in C++ and Unreal Engine though I have changed my mind on this five or six times now, and every time I bring up the engine Rob groans loudly and makes a face that implies I am slowly killing him from the inside out. It also may or may not be open source (another comment which when stated aloud implies that Rob led a simple life, free of troubles before he met me).

In terms of all my other not game projects, I don't think I'm killing any of them off. I am going to try to portion off some "20% time" to work on some of my other projects if only for palate cleaning interludes, or to deal with those extreme "nothing ever works" periods. That's both development and writing projects. I will finish a not-3-day novel one of these days.

Finally, this blog may veer into game development a little bit, though I am planning on keeping much of the standard fare coming as well -- which is to say a mix of personal interest (always my most popular posts much to no one's surprise but me), technical posts (relating to both philosophy and computer science), and if I stay brave maybe another tutorial. I'll try to keep everything properly tagged though so if you are only interested in one of the things I talk about it should be reasonably easy to keep track of just that facet. Due to the fact that I will be making my own schedule for game development I am going to try and blog more frequently, though I have made these promises before.

In general, stay tuned, things are changing for me, and since I am a child of the internet age I am happy to share an extremely favourably curated version of how those changes are affecting my life, with you.