GameDev Skills: Year One

It has been almost a year ago that I made a commitment to spent time developing coding skills and I’m providing an update about my efforts. I can say that it has been a real joy to feel a sense of progress since I’ve undertaken this new endeavor. Here are the details

Here is a pictures of what I’ve spent time at.

Thanks to Procrastitracker I am able to share these images of my progress when I started October 11, 2021 up to September 30, 2022:

In summary, I’ve spent about 41 hours watching videos and reading about game development, 54 hours planning and writing, and about 63 hours doing actual coding. I’ve done less than 2 hours a week of actual coding. At this rate it will take me years to get to 1,000 or 10,000 hours!

This past year has given me six insights:

1. I feel validated about my initial conviction to avoid GameDev because it is engrossing, allot of work, and will take 100s of hours to accomplish anything of merit.
2. While it is a huge undertaking, it is possible to do this in small increments. I now see GameDev skill development being acquired by carving out a little bit of time each day or week.
3. It takes a long time to accomplish even a little in GameDev as it is easily the hardest creative endeavor even though adopting a Godot as my game engine has accelerated this. It has taken me close to a year of part-time development to accomplish some very small demos. I am learning to be modest about my output since when I actually look at the amount of time I’ve spent, the effort has been modest as well.
4. The GameDev coding has opened me up to a greater understanding about game design theory and has rejuvenated my theories on this blog and over at Heropath.
5. I’ve discovered joy in doing something even a little bit each day/week. Time passes regardless if I do something or not. By filling up some of my time with something I am passionate about is rewarding on two levels; I’m learning to enjoy the GameDev journey and as I progress I slowly get closer to completing my passion project.
6. Organizing ideas can be challenging and while writing them down in a blog is a start, it quickly becomes unmanageable because of the blog’s linear nature. I’ve discovered the beauty of TiddlyWiki as a non-linear way to cultivate and organize ideas and resources.

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My plan is to continue the journey because it has overall been allot of fun. I’ll continue to work with Godot (it really appears to be a great engine), start learning to do my own video game graphic work, and carve out some time to do website coding. I think I’ll be able to launch the next demo version of Heropath later in 2022.

I have to stop updating Skill Development Character Sheet as the recent PDF formatting lost all of the embedded fonts making it not possible to edit easily. That’s too bad.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! I’m thankful for my family, friends, and the amazing software and tutorials that has allowed me to get to this point.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” ~ Simone Weil