4 month catch-up

Right before May began I had decided I was going to become a game developer. I always talked about getting into the gaming industry, but I never did anything about it. Instead I took Creative Writing as my course in college back in 2014. With the world crashing down, I also needed a better way to make money (freelance writing is not as lucrative as you’d think *sarcasm*).

A good friend of mine (Cam AKA Hiccup), suggested I do something to keep her updated on my progress, and show the process I have when doing whatever it is I am doing. To be honest, I am sort of winging it as I go. Though I have been keeping track of some of the work I’ve done ever since I started this journey in May. I am going to try to be as concise as possible for this first post, and update the blog periodically when I make big leaps in development or knowledge.

May-June

In May I applied for two courses on edX (an online learning platform): CS50’s Introduction to Computer Science, and CS50’s Introduction to Game Development (online classes taught by HarvardX). The courses are free, but I opted to pay for verified certificates so that I could add them to my fancy resume, and hopefully it would make my linkedin profile a bit more professional. My idea was that in order to build a game I would need to acquire a solid understanding and foundation of what went into creating one. I had no idea how to code, and I knew it was going to be difficult. But I was determined to keep moving forward no matter what.

I began with the intro to Computer Science, it was an 8 week course. It had 8 lectures with 8 assignments along with a final project. You could potentially do more than one lecture a week, if that was your pace. All I could handle though was once lecture a week. The assignments were difficult as they mostly had you writing code from scratch. As someone with no background in coding, I had a tremendously challenging time from beginning to end, but it was worth it.

Some of the code I wrote for the assignments:

• 

• 

• 

• 

A lot of the problems had to do with figuring out the proper formulas and translating it to code. I didn’t start out great. I was slow, and frustrated most of the time, but the feeling of finally creating a working program felt like nothing else I had done before. It was about 4 weeks in when I started to get a grasp of how to code my own way. It was still mind boggling, but I was far better than I had been in the first week. In the course I learned the coding languages of C, Python, SQL, and Lua (for the gaming track I picked).

I didn’t spend the whole week working on the assignments. In between I was working on the concept for my game. I didn’t want to get too ahead of myself trying to learn the nitty-gritty of game development, so I started on a more abstract level. I worked on the broad strokes, from character art, music ideas, and story. I adapted a story I created for my home-brew Dungeons and Dragons world, and decided to use it for the game I dreamt of finishing down the line.

Here are a few of my not so great concept arts (made in gimp):

• 

• 

• 

I will probably talk about the story concept in a future post. What I will say for now is that the game I plan on developing will be called H.A.U.N.T., the main character is a Haunter, shown above. You are equipped with a hat, half-cape, lantern, and a whip (which I have yet to draw). I spent a lot of my time as well watching game design videos of Game Maker’s Toolkit on YouTube. He is a journalist focused on game design philosophy, so his videos helped me in refining the concept of my game on a surface level. Such as the ideas the game will communicate, the overall theme, gameplay mechanics, art style, and others I can share in another post. The coding part, which was going to be the bulk of the game, I would worry about later. I looked to a few indie games for inspiration of the art style. Here were my favorites (links to game trailers): The First Tree, Way to the Woods, Firewatch, and Journey.

I did get a bit ahead of myself, and learned some Blender, a 3D modelling program. I did a donut tutorial from Blender Guru, because I knew I wanted to make a 3D game. It was a little overwhelming, though it showed me what I was getting myself into. I knew a 2D game would be way more manageable, but my dreams were set on a 3rd person game.

Some donuts I made from the tutorial (all 3D renders; had to mention this because a friend of mine thought it was real):

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I also worked on making the logo for the Haunters, and very rough 3D character concept art (I forgot where I stole the mannequin model from) :

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

For the final week of June and going into July I was on the final project for my intro to CS. I decided to make a 2D game using my H.A.U.N.T. concept art. I had a lot of experience on sprite work growing up, so creating the art wasn’t a problem for me. You can watch my final submission here. It’s unlisted on YouTube so you can only get to it from that link.

Some examples of the sprite sheets (I re-skinned some assets from a Mario assignment), and tidbits of the code from Visual Studio (a program that helps organize your code):

• 

• 

• 

• 

July

With the intro to Computer Science done it was time to begin the intro to game development. There were more lectures and assignments this time. 11 lectures and 11 assignments plus a final project. Though this time it was easier to follow, and I was more comfortable with understanding game logic. Most of the assignments had us adding to code the classes would give us. All we were required to do was add new features to a certain game. For example, in the Mario assignment we had to add randomly generated keys that you would need to pick up in order to unlock a Key Hole block.

I picked up my pace and did about 2 to 3 lectures a week. The assignments weren’t so taxing in the beginning, that is until it got to the lectures about making games in 3D. On the 9th lecture we were taught the basics of Unity, a very popular game engine. If you aren’t familiar with game engines, a game engine is to games as photoshop is to photos. For all the 2D games we were using a 2D game engine called Love2D.

Anyway here are pictures from some of the assignments:

• 

• 

• 

• 

I learned about 2D animation, game assets, game logic, game design, and much much more. Somewhere between June and July I thought about which game engine I was going to use for my game, and I decided on Unreal Engine (the one used to make Fortnite). I still had a long way to go, but I took each day a step at a time. At this point I had definitely forgotten most of what I learned from Blender (oops).

August

I spent about a week and a half on my final project for the intro to game development. I used many of the assets from the previous assignments, and a lot of what I learned to make my own small game. It runs from start to finish, and is way more polished than my first H.A.U.N.T. game. The game was called Fantasy Knight. I wanted to create a story at random that made fun of, and used the many tropes of most fantasy stories. I could refine the game a bit more, but I am happy with the outcome. I added a lot of random variables to the game so it has some semblance of “replayability”. I used an awesome site beepbox.co to make the music tracks in the game (also used it for my previous final project). If you want to see a short video where I showcase the random fields you can see it here. You can download Fantasy Knight here. There’s a MAC and Windows64 version. For MAC just download unzip and it should be good to go. For the windows, unzip and run the .exe file to play.

Some screencaps:

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

I took a short break after I submitted my final project and began to learn Unreal in the last week of August. It’s a daunting project. The amount I have to learn is frankly insane, and it stresses me out to think about everything I still have yet to figure out. But I’ve gotten this far by taking it one step at a time. I started with an introduction from the Unreal website, and a tutorial on their YouTube channel on how to start creating a 3rd person character.

A single screencap to show what I’m working with:

• 

I have to learn 3D modelling, animation, lighting, rendering, AI, navigation, and countless more lessons. It’s both exciting and terrifying. That’s it for this post.

GG out.