I wanted to take a few minutes to reflect on and share my GameDev journey. Over the last four years I’ve lived out my childhood dream of making a video game. After a career change, shifting jobs a couple times, breaking an arm, and hauling my kids to hockey tournaments around the Midwest, I’ve release my first game, Phrank’s Photon Pharm, in Early Access on Steam. As a solo developer with a day job and super active children it required a lot of balancing which often slowed development time. Despite the chaos of life I just kept plugging away.
An Idea is Born
While I had dozens of ideas for games I’d love to make, I understood that solo-development would severely limit what I could accomplish. Both my children love logic puzzles so I focused on what I could make that would appeal to them and be appropriate for both adults and kids. Seeing the physical logic puzzles they were tearing through at the time I realized those games were all limited by the physical size of the board and to two dimensions. With those two initial changes I was onto something. I chose to go with Unity as I was using C# in my day job so it was easier to pick up.
From Basic Plan to The Wonders of Underland
Initial prototyping showed the logic puzzle concept was viable, but was also limited in the variety of puzzles I was coming up with. I was trying to come up with a theme for the game when I realized one of the basic limitations of some of the logic games my kids played with was a lack of variety in the goals. It was move this thing or get this other thing to light up. I decided to add a color component to the puzzles where the goal would be to send a colored object through the puzzle to the goals. This led to how colors would interact and how to increase complexity by adding multiple goals. Escaping the limitations of two dimensions added that additional layer that led to the Farm theme I settled on.
Don’t Fear the Code Reaper
One of the things I learned in this process is not to be afraid to tear apart my code and, when needed, refactor or completely rewrite scripts. It was often less time consuming to redo a script than try to save clunky code. Every few months I went through and refactored the code to remove any duplication of function and make it more efficient. This process was painful at first as I dumped things I had spent dozens of hours on to replace them with something better.
The Value of Learning
I’ve taken many of GameDev.tv’s courses and have implemented lessons learned from many of them. From level grid management taught in the Turn-based Strategy game course, to the Inventory system in the RPG-course series, to Brian Trotter’s forum revamp of the RPG saving system, to the Blender Geometry Nodes course that led me down the rabbit hole to create a flexible tree generator, GameDev.tv has been a tremendous resource on this journey. With plenty of random YouTube tutorials, and Reddit/StackOverflow posts thrown in the mix, I was able to take my vision and make it a reality.
Just Keep Swimming
As you travel your own GameDev journey just remember to keep on swimming. Life gets crazy and there never seems to be enough time, and sometimes you need to take a break to reset your mind. I found it easier to break tasks up into smaller goals that could be accomplished in a smaller time chunk. That let me use that hour here or there to be far more efficient than I would have otherwise been. When the smaller task was done I crossed it off the list. After a few months you can look back at your To-Do list and see dozens if not hundreds of items crossed off and showing you just how much you accomplished. When you accomplish a larger milestone, take the time to celebrate it, even if no one will ever know how big a step you just took was.
A huge Thank You to GameDev.tv for their awesome courses and community and Happy Dev’ing!
Ian at Cyber Cheese Industries, LLC
Phrank’s Photon Pharm is out now on Steam in Early Access
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2576430/Phranks_Photon_Pharm/