00 - Introductions
Hello, Everyone!
This is the first of, hopefully, many posts that will be detailing my experiences as a game developer! This first post will get the ugly stuff out of the way: basic introductions and background, along with what I am currently working on. I'm not used to blogging so these first few posts will be messy. Let's get into it.
I am a solo indie developer studio. I will begin my story before BoxedWorks was even an idea. I have been dabbling in game development since I was in middle school. From around the age of 12-14, I played the game Roblox. This game has you use the scripting language, Lua, to make levels that other people can play. Basically, the better you were at Lua, the better your levels were. It really piqued my interest in programming and it's where I self-taught myself the basics. Roblox was a great place to learn to program as there were so many resources to look at and forums full of other people as eager as I was to learn. However, two years passed and I eventually left Roblox's Lua (and the game) and transitioned into C++ as I heard that C++ was THE language to use. If you are familiar with C++, you can correctly assume that little Thomas in high school struggled with C++. For those of you who are not as familiar, it is not the most friendly language to begin learning to program. I attempted to make a few games, all of which were text-based. This caused my first dry spell in game development as I was discouraged by everything I did not know and needed to learn along with the newfound awareness I received. I was beginning to realize that games are hard to make! Games have a lot going on in the background and require much more work than I previously thought they would. I still would not learn this lesson fully until years later.
Around six months later, I picked up Java as Minecraft became popular. I think I got into Java because I saw Minecraft was made from it and I also heard it was an easier version of C++. I attempted to make a few games with graphics this time but, as I did not know enough, they never became even close to finished. During this time I used SDL for around a month and then moved onto OpenGL. I made my own engines out of these graphics libraries each time which really taught me what was going on in the background of games. The engines were poorly made but taught me the basics of sprites, buffers, and the process of sending vertex/normal/UV data to shaders. This is when my second dry spell began as GLSL shading really confused me with all of its vector math.
The end of my freshmen year in college is when I began programming again. I only kept at it for a month or two when I attempted to make a 2D tile-based game. It did not get far but was the first time I made a somewhat functional level editor. This is when the third and final (major) dry spell occurred. My sophomore year begins and I take up some extra credit for one of my courses. This project consists of creating a website for entering in some data. This was good for me as it gave me an excuse to freshen up on some HTML and get my grade up. This is important because, after this extra credit, the professor asked me if I wanted to try to make an app with him. I downloaded Android Studio and attempted to use its interface to make a user-friendly GUI. This was going well, I had an app that would pull information from a database and load it into its views. As the semester ended I lost contact with the professor and that project ended. However, this kicked off my mobile development career as I was very interested in developing for mobile. I loved seeing an app in Android Studio, having it build, and moved onto my phone. It was like having my game, but a tangible version.
This brings us to... almost recent. Last year, Summer of 2016, I was going into my Junior year of college. I was with my mom at the time in a town that I did not know anyone in. Combine this with the lack of a car and you get someone who has too much time on their hands. I continued using Android Studio and began developing a 3D platformer (left). I dropped the project eventually and started on a 2.5D dungeon crawler (right) where you were an archer. This turned into a Space Invaders-type game which was, of course, eventually dropped.
It is a few years later and and have two games published to the App Store and Play Store, and have switched from Android Studio to Unity. These games' info can be found at the top of the blog; I should be coming out with some posts soon detailing both of them soon. This post is long enough. Thanks for reading this far!
A History
I am a solo indie developer studio. I will begin my story before BoxedWorks was even an idea. I have been dabbling in game development since I was in middle school. From around the age of 12-14, I played the game Roblox. This game has you use the scripting language, Lua, to make levels that other people can play. Basically, the better you were at Lua, the better your levels were. It really piqued my interest in programming and it's where I self-taught myself the basics. Roblox was a great place to learn to program as there were so many resources to look at and forums full of other people as eager as I was to learn. However, two years passed and I eventually left Roblox's Lua (and the game) and transitioned into C++ as I heard that C++ was THE language to use. If you are familiar with C++, you can correctly assume that little Thomas in high school struggled with C++. For those of you who are not as familiar, it is not the most friendly language to begin learning to program. I attempted to make a few games, all of which were text-based. This caused my first dry spell in game development as I was discouraged by everything I did not know and needed to learn along with the newfound awareness I received. I was beginning to realize that games are hard to make! Games have a lot going on in the background and require much more work than I previously thought they would. I still would not learn this lesson fully until years later.
Around six months later, I picked up Java as Minecraft became popular. I think I got into Java because I saw Minecraft was made from it and I also heard it was an easier version of C++. I attempted to make a few games with graphics this time but, as I did not know enough, they never became even close to finished. During this time I used SDL for around a month and then moved onto OpenGL. I made my own engines out of these graphics libraries each time which really taught me what was going on in the background of games. The engines were poorly made but taught me the basics of sprites, buffers, and the process of sending vertex/normal/UV data to shaders. This is when my second dry spell began as GLSL shading really confused me with all of its vector math.
The end of my freshmen year in college is when I began programming again. I only kept at it for a month or two when I attempted to make a 2D tile-based game. It did not get far but was the first time I made a somewhat functional level editor. This is when the third and final (major) dry spell occurred. My sophomore year begins and I take up some extra credit for one of my courses. This project consists of creating a website for entering in some data. This was good for me as it gave me an excuse to freshen up on some HTML and get my grade up. This is important because, after this extra credit, the professor asked me if I wanted to try to make an app with him. I downloaded Android Studio and attempted to use its interface to make a user-friendly GUI. This was going well, I had an app that would pull information from a database and load it into its views. As the semester ended I lost contact with the professor and that project ended. However, this kicked off my mobile development career as I was very interested in developing for mobile. I loved seeing an app in Android Studio, having it build, and moved onto my phone. It was like having my game, but a tangible version.
This brings us to... almost recent. Last year, Summer of 2016, I was going into my Junior year of college. I was with my mom at the time in a town that I did not know anyone in. Combine this with the lack of a car and you get someone who has too much time on their hands. I continued using Android Studio and began developing a 3D platformer (left). I dropped the project eventually and started on a 2.5D dungeon crawler (right) where you were an archer. This turned into a Space Invaders-type game which was, of course, eventually dropped.
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