I want to make a video game

For as long as I have wanted to do software development, I have wanted to make games. Games probably came first now that I think about it. I got a lot from the medium growing. Not just entertainment, but being part of several different communities, and offering a creative outlet throughout most of my life.

I imagine it probably like this for a lot of people who end up in software dev. It feels like a really great starting out point for any career in the industry, whether you're someone doing design work, or writing code, to user experiences and networking. Games encompass so many of the different disciplines that many of us use day to day.

Unfortunately, people need money to trade for goods and services. Right up until almost going to do a games programming course at University, I thought I could make game dev into a job as easily as I could web development or desktop programming. I think I absolutely made the right choice to focus on a career in web development, especially in terms of a "comfortable" life where I could earn enough money to live my life generally how I wanted straight out of University.

But now I can't help but feel like I cheated myself a little bit. I didn't give it a chance. I think now it can at least become my hobby, without me getting burnt out from my day job. When I talk about programming as a hobby now, I talk about working on projects for other people, never myself. Even though 95% of stuff never gets released, the motivation for me starting something is normally "this would be really useful for me and hopefully everyone else in existence".

So I kind of want to make a game for me. It won't be a fun game, but it's definitely something I want to finish for myself. I'm putting this up as a blog post to show myself in 2 years when I'm sat watching TV covered in Dorito crumbs and get the passing thought about this unfinished game. I'll be able to look back at how continually naive I was.

Maybe this is the start of a late 20's crisis. It probably is.

Past game dev attempts

I thought I would also self-servingly (and a little motivating for me, maybe) look back at some previous attempts at making stuff for games.

Prior to doing Computer Science at University, I had tried a couple of things. First was making maps with the Source SDK. If you don't know, if you own any Source game (Half Life 2, Counter Strike Source/GO, Left 4 Dead, TF2 etc) you have access to the modding tools for that game, along with access to creating mods with the Source SDK Base.

This is a really appealing prospect if you just want to mess about with making levels for single player or multiplayer games. It's something I wish more companies did, including Valve who dragged their feet releasing the Source 2 tools, and still are for the most part.

The tools are bad, outdated, and it barely works. It's the tool which taught me to basically hit Ctrl+S every time I changed one little thing, something which I do to this day whenever I am programming. So thanks for that Valve.

Whilst hard to use, there was a wealth of tutorial websites out there. This was pre every tutorial being a youtube video, so websites like Halfwit-2, Interlopers, and the forums on Facepunch were required reading and following. This worked out really well though. I remember Halfwit-2 especially being great for small digestible content on how to do particular things on a map. Wanted to quickly refresh on how to get nice water? Halfwit-2 had a page you could skim in a few minutes and get up to speed.

So from 2007 to 2013-ish, I was just making maps. Here's a bunch of pictures from that time:

Basically a lot of stuff like that, and I mean a lot. For some reason I made a couple hundred little maps like this, of just random things I thought of which never went anywhere special.

At the end of 2007 at the ripe age of 13, I also tried my first coding. I made a little mod for Garrysmod, which at the time was just beta testing a brand new version (Gmod2007) which overhauled a bunch of stuff to better prepare the game for the future. It was missing some NPCs from the Half Life series. The game just didn't have the icons and a little script to spawn them with a basic engine command. So I quickly wrote up an addon for that. It was one of the most downloaded Garrysmod addons for a little while, before it got stolen and re-uploaded by someone else. I look back on the fact someone stole it and re-uploaded it quite fondly now, but at the time it felt like the worst thing.

A brief intermission to the test mapping was Portal 2 being released, and the introduction of the world portal entity. When the game released, one of the first things I did was decompile the maps, and try and figure out the world portal entity. This lead to me being one of the first to post tutorials about how to use it online, along with some examples.

Eventually I joined the Jaykin Bacon (Now Jabroni Brawl, wishlist now on Steam thanks) as a mapper, which meant I actually had to finish a couple of maps, which I did:

Fast forward to today, I don't think either of the finished maps are in the mod anymore because they are compiled with older versions of the source engine. But I'm still pretty happy with them!

CSGO got released around the same time, and once it released Valve released the Hammer tool alongside it. It was the most substantial update Hammer had received in a long long time, and with some newly acquired modelling skills I wanted to try and make a map based on a city street, with the bomb site being a popular sandwich shop brand (I realise now that this is a bad idea, and would never be accepted into the game about terrorists and counter terrorists. I was young and an idiot).

It was shaping up! I clearly had a bit too much fun with making the sign, tables and seats with my pirated version of 3D Max. This is certainly not the first thing you should be doing when blocking a map. But even today, I'm still pretty impressed that I made that!

And that was it. I didn't try mapping for the source engine again. Scrubway happened just as I started University, and I decided "Hey, lets learn all about this web framework Ruby on Rails and try and earn some money" instead, which was a good choice I think.

Happening around the same time frame as this (a little before joining Jaykin Bacon), the game engine Unity become free for mucking about and releasing small indie games. Like many other people, I also downloaded it and gave it a try. I did the thing which I am pretty sure a million other people have also done as their first mucking about; I made a game about rolling a ball around.

It had a few level, and an online leaderboard system which I made using PHP I think. Unity was cool for also allowing games to be deloped on Android with the same codebase. I could even compile the game for use in a web browser, truly the future! All of this is the result of giving people access to development tools and software for free; letting teenagers make bad games about rolling balls.

I had tried other things over the years as well. 2D engines such as LOVE2D and Scirra Construct 2 stick out as things I saw people doing neat games with, and I just lacked the mental strength to deep dive into. I even got involved with a Crysis 1 mod about racing jetskis. I don't quite remember how that came about. It was something I thought about every day, and I just jumped between programming, 3D modelling, texturing, game design, without a thought of how it would all come together.

And thats it, I think thats the best overview I can give without every little granular detail. At the same time as the CSGO map, I got into web dev more. I found a job using that skill and it made the most sense to just go all in on that. It feels to me that 7 years of my teenage life was spent trying to achieve this goal of making games, modding games, and generally being part of a community. Ultimately, I got something really great out of it (my career, which I am grateful for), but I left a little bit of my heart behind.

It absolutely won't work out, but I owe it to myself from a decade ago to try making something for myself in my spare time. So, I want to make a game, and decided to write this post to remind myself why.

I don't know why I did such the header image like that.