In my last post, I described a new interest I had developed, which was game development. Suffice to say, its been several months and anyone reading this series might be wondering “What happened?”

I’ll be honest: I hit a wall, both creatively and technically. Allow me to explain a bit on what happened.

To follow up on the tools I was using (since I promised to do so in the last post), I decided on the Unity engine for learning and building. My key rationale for picking this was that Unity had both solid 2D + 3D support, and the backing scripting was in C#, a language I am familiar with thanks to my current job.

The fact that Unity also has an active and supportive community in the form of reddit, discord, and other blogs, it was an obvious choice for me.

I learned a ton and even had a very primitive demo of some stuff I had worked for my game. While the video there is short, a discerning Unity developer will see at least 7 or 8 different concepts implemented and functioning well enough (though you just have to trust me on the object pooling implementation, since those sections in the scene are collapsed)

So what walls did I hit after all that progress? Well, firstly, let’s talk about game development in general. I believe the best games are a fusion of love for a particular genre together with a unique and interesting core mechanic to shape that genre around. Personal opinion here, and this is mostly speaking with regards to indie games and not AAA titles.

As a great example of this, I’ll once again use Path of Exile, whose developers built a successor to the beloved Diablo 2 by taking many of the core concepts and building upon a unique system where you gain skills from gem items rather than inherently earning them as you level.

I am a new and devoted fan of rogue like/lite games, so I had the passion and love boxes all ticked on my list. What I lacked, however, was a creative vision or unique idea to expand upon the genre in a way I felt happy with.

As you can see in my little demo above, most of what I was enjoying was just learning the framework and trying to mimic ideas from other games. By the time I had gotten through several tutorials and hours and hours of time, what I had at the end was the skills needed to maybe build a game for someone else, but not my own game.

This isn’t a new problem for me, mind you. I’ve always considered myself far more proficient at taking someone else’s vision to fruition rather than carving out a new and unique path myself. This manifests both with my actual job and unofficial jobs I’ve had, where I generally prefer to lead a smaller group or team on the path of achieving a larger shared vision.

Lacking a vision wasn’t my only problem, though. I wanted to build something alone, by myself, and I quickly realized that I did not like the idea of using art or assets built for the general public. What I did not have though was the technical skill or artistic training needed to efficiently build the assets I was going to need, nor did I have the desire to learn that on top of all the other things I was learning.

In that brief honeymoon period of wanting to build a game I kind of glossed over and ignored the reality that I would eventually need assets and art to make something I would be proud of. I dabbled in sprite creation and produced a few things I was happy with, but a full game would demand far bigger and far more detailed things to make punchy.

So for now, the project is on hold, but I’ve been busy with some other things since the last post. I should have posted much sooner about this update but I was a bit ashamed at myself for having given up for now.

In the time since then, I’ve played through Cyberpunk 2077, a fantastic game that I initially had some issues with until I learned that having any kind of third-party screen recording software caused the steam version to frequently crash. I also learned to play pickle ball and even was gifted a set of equipment for my birthday.

Work has also been quite exhausting, with a ton of change and shifting of expectations that has led to me being quite stressed out. I am hoping I am over the hump with it for now, but time will tell.

Recently, I’ve picked up Street Fighter 6, which might be one of the best fighting games ever made if I do say so myself. There was so much love and effort put into this game, and it is refreshing to see. I am enjoying the time I get to play it with my friends at the moment, and may branch out to random online matches when I get a bit better.

Lastly, I’ve been working hard on seriously upping my culinary skills. I’ve slowly been acquiring new equipment for my kitchen as well as trying out a ton of new recipes. With the insane price rise for take-out as of late combined with my own desire to find new hobbies, I’ve discovered a deep appreciation for home cooking. This is the “refresh” I alluded to in the title, and its something I am enjoying quite a bit with lots more to learn.

Perhaps in the next blog I will talk a bit about what equipment I’ve bought and the successes I’ve had so far with cooking.

As always, thanks to anyone who takes the time to read these, and just know that I haven’t given up on game development yet. I still loved the work I did with Letterflash, and simple web-based games might be a niche that I am more comfortable with as a solo-developer rather than anything built in Unity. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a chance to work with other people on a larger scoped game at some point. That could be fun!