GameDev Skills: Year Two

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.

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Thanks to Procrastitracker I am able to share these images of my progress when I started October 1, 2022 up to September 30, 2023:

This past year of work on Heropath was fraught with some challenges and issues. Some Procrastitracker info is missing and Heropath development was halted due to:

• The Laptop hard drive being switched out for a new SSD between Oct 3 to Oct 7 2022.
• I was away for a total of six weeks for family vacation in February and May to celebrate our 30 year marriage anniversary. I was able to do some story development but no coding during this time.
• My laptop battery exploded on fire on August 23! We were very fortunate that the fire did not injure me or set the house on fire. Lesson: Don’t buy knock-off batteries! I saved $50 by buying a non-brand name battery and nearly lost it all. Thankfully the hard drive I bought last October survived.
• I have found my other projects having greater momentum has detracted from Heropath. But this is teaching me that I need to have a solid design idea in order to re-write the game.

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As I mentioned in my Heropath blog post I have decided to re-write the codebase which got me into playing with 3D in Godot to explore that as a way of expanding the immersive aspects of Heropath. 3D is really challenging and I can see why sticking to 2D is logical for beginner game developers. But I am going to continue to explore 3D as my concept is meant to be a surreal heroic adventure-strategy game and First Person would allow a more surreal experience.

In addition, I am continuing to work on my Design and Logic of the game. This is pretty hard to do with linear documenting so I have decided to use Python as a way to prototype my systems logic on Windows.

In summary, I’ve spent about 296 hours working on the game including research, writing, design, and coding (only 79 hours). This means I’ve done less than 1 hour 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 not had the direct progress that I had planned for, but I accept that this is what happens when it comes to creative projects.

Things unexpected come up (or explode) and it is essential to stay open to what these tell me. The younger, impatient me would have become frustrated, discouraged, and filled with self-criticism. I have become wiser to my mind patterns and have learned not to worry about those things. Heropath remains a concept that has captured my passion and I intend to continue working on it.

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