After COVID I found a lot of free time on my hands. Me and my friend were writing a huge “book” (it was more like a screenplay with dialogues) — 10 stories within a story, a project we’d initially started 5 years back then abandoned, now back up again. An anthology sci-fi comedic thriller type epic. While we were working on it, my friend kept asking if we could make a game.
I knew nothing about it and was initially reluctant — my previous attempts at some random free game-making app were just entertainment for a while, then I didn’t get much joy. But he kept talking about it and after seeing his first platformer game I got excited. Ok… maybe this thing is good. And the next time he asked if I want to make a game I said sure, let’s do it.
I made the art for the game (spillover from the animator era — I was learning pixel art) and he would code it. That was the deal. And on seeing my character — a robot — move on screen with my input. That was bliss. I loved the concept of making games now.
I found a great tutorial series by Brackeys and chose Unity. I didn’t know how to code — my most programming-adjacent activity was making webpages with just HTML and CSS. But I followed along, made a cube game. It was so fun. Not the game — that was mid — but the process was so fun. I enrolled in a game jam, the Kindred Jam. I just mindlessly copied the entire code step by step. If I changed anything aside from the theme or art, I was screwed.
Then slowly, I started learning the patterns and the reasoning behind why this line is being coded, how Unity’s interface works. I got comfortable enough to start making my own games.
Why game dev specifically clicked
There’s a common theme among all my interests — all are creative fields which I suck at. But these are the kinds of things I enjoy doing in my free time. I like how the logic fits together. Especially with game development, there are a lot of problems you need to find solutions for. Quite a bit of math.
I had always loved math for being the universal language and physics for being the practical application of mathematics. Game development gave me a virtual environment to make our own problems. That’s the fun part — you’re not just finding solutions to other people’s problems, you’re making your own. The challenges are very unique to the setup and environment you’ve created in your project.
Let’s say I have a player. I have to make him jump. Simple, just add some force in the Y direction. So I get an input — when the player presses spacebar, add a force. Great, a jump works. But the player can spam spacebar and fly away. So we need to add a ground collision check so I can only jump if I’m touching the ground. But what do we consider “ground”? We use a layer system, tag certain objects as ground…