Hi everyone! I am George and I love playing, creating and sharing games! I've been playing games for as long as I remember and it's been a couple of years that I've dipped my toes into game development. In this post I will share some more info about my experiences with games!
Playing games
I've got fond memories of holding one of my first consoles, a Game Boy Color with Pokemon Fire Red in my hands and getting lost in the world of Kanto for days. I've been spending my evenings playing Tony Hawk's Underground 2 doing wild combos in Barcelona and building my own maps and managed to complete all the gold medals in Burnout Takedown 3 within a summer. After setting up my gaming PC I've delved into the world of MMOs starting with Star Wars Galaxies leveling up as a freelancer pilot, aspiring to be the next Han Solo! After a while me and my friends moved into World of Warcraft where we spent a good 4 years playing through Burning Crusade and WoTLK! I still remember our first adventure where my friends, two lvl 12 Human Warriors came all the way to Darnassus to meet my Night Elf character and travel together back to Eastern Kingdoms for leveling together! The last few years, I've enjoyed the storytelling of Larian Studios saving Rivellon (twice!) in their Divinity Original Sin 1 and 2 games and had the opportunity to travel through the Forgotten Realms and destroy the Elder Brain in Baldur's Gate 3 with my Half-Elf Bard character!
An itch for game development
Games have been a big part of my life and I've learned a lot of things about myself and my friends through them. I always wanted to create a game that I could share with friends to play! In my younger years I loved creating maps for games and playing with friends. I've created a dozen of maps for Tony Hawk's Underground 2 trying to create interesting sequences of structures and obstacles for fun combos. In Warcraft III I've experimented with various map layouts trying to create interesting scenarios and tinkered with character stats to create a game mode similar to WoW's Arena PvP. In Colin McRae Rally I've created circuits making huge ramps that launch cars high in the air! As the years passed, I tried to get more control on the creative process. I started learning Unity and Blender through YouTube tutorials and official resources. After a lot of learning I decided to try my luck at a game jam.
My first game jam
It's April 2020 and Ludum Dare 46 is on! The theme: Keep it Alive. I decided that whatever happens, I'll submit a game by the end of the weekend. The game idea revolved around a sick horse that you find in the middle of the forest. I wanted to create two scenes where you first stabilize its condition by feeding it with apples and then you travel to the nearby village to get help from a vet. The scope proved to be too much for my beginner skills so by the end of Saturday I decided to focus on the first scene and finalize a mini game. The objective was simple: help the horse survive for 2 minutes by feeding it with apples while its health bar decreases… rapidly. The apples would spawn randomly at an equally rapid rate in the nearby trees. Everything in the scene was created using the basic 3D models available through Unity's menu. By the end of Sunday the very finicky game was submitted with the innovative name “The horse needs help”. It didn't matter that the models were too basic, that the music was a better fit for a spooky game or that the mechanics were loosely tuned. What mattered to me was that I completed my first game, a game that was contained in my head 2 days ago and now it's right here in front of me and can be shared with friends, family and other people. The comments on the ldjam page were very heartwarming, everyone was encouraging and giving great tips for improving the gameplay or making it more discoverable by adding a thumbnail among others. This was a first step for a series of awesome experiences with game development.
Feelings and thoughts on creating games
The past week my girlfriend and I worked together on a tabletop game for the first time, as our submission for Global Game Jam 25. She has never worked on a game before but she has a good hand for painting and loved some of the tabletop games I've been hoarding lately. Tried my best to persuade her and we both had a great experience this weekend making Bubble Diving, a co-op tabletop where a team of divers goes deep in the sea to search for buried treasure, while avoiding the huge bubbles emmited by the rock bottom (a recap post will follow). After all the dust has settled, I had a look into my itch.io page containing my 6 uploaded games. This tabletop submission was the 7th game I've created either solo or as a team. Looking into each one I remember good memories with friends, challenging problems solved and having fun rushing to submit a fun game before a deadline in jams. Game development might be tiring but it feels very rewarding looking at the final result after a lot of work, celebrating with friends at the end of a jam or having fun with them playing and getting stuck at your stupid bug (it's a feature).
Ongoing Projects
Currently my longer running project is a video game under the nickname “Lenses”. This is a puzzle game where the player uses optics items like lenses and mirrors to direct a beam of light from point A to B. I'm working on this solo to learn as much as I can around various aspects of game development from game design to 3D modelling and creating music and sfx. I've started working on this game in 2023 and I still have some way to go before releasing the final version. I would like to share more thoughts during the development of it in the future and keep a dev log here.
This is my first time writing a blog post and the first time I feel any motivation to keep on posting my interests somewhere. I'll try to post more regularly sharing some thoughts on my game dev journey and other things that I find interesting. If you've made it this far, thanks for taking the time to read this and if you try one of my games I'd be happy to hear your opinions on them.
Until next time!
