Intro (A Not-So-Quick Introduction to Why I'm Here)
Hello!
In case we haven't met before, I'm Vesha, and I'm a Jack of Many Trades, Master of None. You can check out the About page to learn more about me, but for now, you should just know that I'm starting this Game Dev blog to track my progress towards becoming an indie game developer.
I always find myself being interested in too many things at once. When I was 25, I dove into pottery, embroidery, building an (unfinished) collaborative crossword site, and co-leading a 501(c)3 (which no longer exists). I made some progress on some of these things, but abandoned all of them when they got too hard, and when I faced the possibility of failing on a project as I learned.
I recently turned 30, and found that I'd abandoned all hobbies that once brought me joy, and didn't have anything I was actively building toward. I have nowhere to put my creative energy. I've been hungry to build towards something I care a lot about, which can also bring me community, so I decided to revisit a hobby that I've taken half-hearted jabs at in the past: game development.
Why Game Development?
I first realized I even wanted to make a game after playing Cosmo D's indie game, The Norwood Suite, at the recommendation of a friend in summer 2020. Like everyone else, I'd been dealing with the ennui of living through a tense election year, a pandemic, and quarantining from my previous life in NYC that I'd work so hard to build, and life just felt meh.
Somehow, playing The Norwood Suite transported me elsewhere; when playing it, I didn't feel like I was sitting on the floor of my empty little East Village apartment after packing up my belongings to leave NYC. It took my mind off of how desperately I was trying to avoid the increasingly divisive stories being pushed online. I didn't think about walking through an eerily empty New York a few hours prior, wondering if life would ever return to what it was before.
I was too busy enjoying a weird, sublime mystery of the Norwood hotel; completely rapt by the story and the world Cosmo D had built. And when it was over, I was so sad to return to the real world.
I hadn't been moved by a game like that since I first played Benoît Sokal’s Syberia I and II (we won't discuss III) as a kid back in the early 2000s (and then again in 2012, and again in 2017). The Norwood Suite reminded me of how powerful it could be to sweep someone up in a story, and how just being in a world where things feel different could impact a player emotionally. I wanted to learn to do that. I started dreaming of worlds to build, and statements to make in as interactive a way as possible.
What's the blog for?
With the fresh inspiration of my immersion in Cosmo D's games, I started watching GMTK, Brackeys, Ask Gamedev, GDC talks, Unity tutorials, and a few other YouTube channels, and then I....did absolutely nothing with what I learned. Work, stress, life, and too little motivation led me to continue "planning" to build a game, but not doing it. I would think of a kernel of an idea for a game world or mechanic, excitedly race to write it down, and then be intimidated by how massive an idea sounded, or the fact that I hadn't written code in years since switching to Engineering Management.
I've always tended to give up on things when they didn't come easily to me. I guess it's the curse of having once been a kid who adults praised as being academically gifted and naturally imaginative. I saw having to work hard as a failure, and it's deterred me from doing so much that I've been interested in life.
It’s me.
Somehow, I now feel ready to learn, fail, keep trying, and generally wrestle my way to building something I'm proud of, and I will give myself two years to do it (yikes/yay!).
As I searched for how others became game developers in adulthood, most of what I found was either a discontinued blog, or a reflection on what they learned in their first X months of development. With this blog, I'll aim to create what I was hoping to find in my initial (albeit short) search: a real account of what I'm doing to learn as I go, along with which resources really helped me out, and the mistakes I learn from. If you want to follow along, you can subscribe here to hear of updates, and be notified of new posts.
Here's to embracing being bad at something, and then one day possibly being good!
Resources for this week
I started this week off casting a breadth-first approach to learning. I started off excitedly with an idea for a dystopian detective game in mind (who hasn't?). I wrote pages and pages of ideas for the game before I thought, "I should probably actually look up the best way to start a game before I go too far".
Fortunately, I watched Mark Brown's video on the importance of prototyping before getting too involved with details about a game that aren't focused on the game's core mechanic. Then, I went down a rabbit hole about prototyping and found this awesome GDC talk on two college courses that had students prototype 1 game per week. Hearing Douglas Wilson and Bennett Foddy talk about the importance of building your taste for game dev by building small game prototypes really stuck with me. Then, I realized I don't even have the basic game dev skills to be able to build a prototype in 7 days.
So. I started this week excitedly diving deep into a nebulous idea for a 3D first person dystopian detective photojournalism game, when I hadn't even figured out how I'd know if the game would be any good. I'm ending the week with the resolve to put that idea away for at least 12 - 18 months (probably a year), until I've learned enough to develop taste as a game dev.
This week's resources are a mix of thoughts on getting started with game development, rapid prototyping, and a handful of the games that have inspired me.
Starting in Game Development
[Read] Bass Monkey Postmortem: From Zero Experience to Solo Game Dev in 18 Months (Without Quitting Your Day Job!) [Jacob Weersing]
Prototyping
[Read] How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days [Matt Kucic]
[Watch] The mistake every new game developer makes [Mark Brown]
[Watch] Game a Week: Teaching Students to Prototype [Douglas Wilson and Bennett Foddy]
Games
Syberia I and II – these are old point and click games that are still beautiful by today's standards, though the controls are a bit clunky. They cover one of the most unique and moving stories I've seen in a video game.
Off Peak – a free demo by Cosmo D. If you want a taste of the world of The Norwood Suite, it's a good intro.
The Norwood Suite – a great, imaginative indie game.
Miscellaneous
[Read] Venba and Papers, Please Flex the Same Emotional Muscle [Yousif Kassab]
[Watch] Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage [Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage]
Coming up next week
Over the next week, I'll focus on developing my high-level 12 and 24 month plan for learning about game dev, to be shared in next week's post. I'm sure my plans will change as I learn more over time, but this'll serve as a guide for me since I'm new to this!
If you know anyone in Chicago who works on games, or any resources on making the most of your first 12-24 months as a game dev, please send them my way!
I imagine future blog posts will be shorter, but if you'd like to follow along on my journey, please sign up to hear when the next blog post is up, and you can get in touch with me at games@vesha.dev.
