I made a game!

About 6 months ago I changed my job.  I moved from teaching English into the field of engineering.  Now I don't actually know diddly jack shit about being an engineer or anything related to that field but I was lucky enough to get in based almost purely on the fact that I speak English and Japanese.

During my time at this company so far I've been learning a whole bunch of different things related to the type of engineering I'm in but there was one slow day where one of my coworkers approached me and reccomended that I try to teach myself a bit of Python.

Now I didn't know the first thing about coding (and I still kinda don't) but I got to work on teaching myself the basics of  Python 3.  After watching a bunch of tutorials on YouTube and following some guides online I got to doing the one thing I always wanted to do, which was making a game.  Of course, I'm trying to throw together a little project with barely any experience and in my work office so the only idea I could really muster for an environment like that was a silly text adventure.

So here I present to you, "Escape from Mr Stabby's Mansion", a silly game full of cheap deaths and badly written gore.  Please give it a download and maybe give me some feeback!  I'm going to carry on my adventure into programming and maybe try and produce something that's more than just text in a command prompt.  

https://www.dropbox.com/s/m7krr00gi8zqk9l/Mr%20Stabby%27s%20MansionV1.zip?dl=0

It's a fun hobby and if you were thinking about getting into it I'd recommend just throwing yourself at it full force.  It's daunting and there's A LOT to learn but even something stupid and simple like this is a lot of fun to throw together!

I will make a separate page for "Things wot I made" soon so this link doesn't get buried but for now feel free to download it off this page!

Game Dev Is Hard

I think anyone who is seriously into video game has had a dream or at least a thought of wanting to make their own game at some point.  With the rise of indie developers making huge numbers of sales on platforms like Steam, why wouldn't you want a piece of that pie, right?  However game development is INCREDIBLY hard.

I've been trying, for a while, just to make my own piece of shit game in RPG Maker.  Now maybe it's a problem with the genre I'm trying to develop for but before you even start doing anything on a computer there's so much that you have to think about.  I feel that if you don't go in with a decent plan then the project is going to, maybe not fall apart, but get pretty confusing pretty quickly.  You have to have all your ideas and how they are going to work together straight before you really begin.

Now you would think that the actual putting together of the game, the coding, would be the hardest part of the process.  While coding is an extremely hard thing to do we now live in an age where there are a number of programs to help you along with this process. For example, I'm making something in RPG Maker and I know next to nothing about coding.  Despite that, I've been able to use the tools provided to at least get SOMETHING working.  A little man walking around an island that gets into random battles doesn't sound like much but when you're starting from the bottom it's a pretty big deal.  I have another friend who is trying to make a point and click adventure game in an engine called AGS and as far as I know he taught himself all the coding side of that by just fucking around with the program and asking on forums for help.  Of course, you're quite limited when you use these kind of tools but when you're just starting out they are a good way to put your big toe into the ocean of game dev, so to speak.

But no, the reason why game development is so hard is just the sheer range of skills you need to be able to pull it off.  There's a reason that very few games are developed just by one guy.  You need to be able to do the coding, compose music, write stories if your game needs it, make artwork and have a good game play idea to make all that shit stick together.  That's A LOT to ask of a single person.  I feel like I have good ideas and if I'm making an RPG or adventure game I'd be pretty good at writing a story but I know NOTHING about composing music and I can't draw for shit.  This is a big roadblock for your average person.

However there are great examples of absolute beasts making great games entirely by themselves.  The one that springs to my mind straight away is Touhou, made by one drunk man who goes by the name of ZUN.

Awesome games, great soundtracks, incredibly challenging and fun to play and yet that artwork is....shall we say mediocre at best.  No one can be perfect though, the amount of skill the guy has in all of those fields surpasses mine by a great deal, I'm truly in awe over how these games even exist.

Still, if you do have an idea for a game and you are slowly working away at it, don't let it die.  If you can't draw, go learn.  If you don't know shit about music? go google some tutorials.  We live in an age where all this information is readily available and if you're willing to put in the hours then anyone could probably pull it off.  Just don't get frustrated when it isn't the walk in the park you were probably hoping it was.