A Video Game

I really like video games. I love creating things digitally. I have some experience in animation, design, and video editing. I have a lot of experience in programming and made my PhD in the field of computer graphics.

So it was kind of obvious that it should fit me, yet it took me a long time to gather the confidence and courage to start developing a video game.

When you have a full-time job, there’s not much time left to seriously pursue a side project that would ideally be more than just some technology demo. That’s one side of it.

The other side is that as a software engineer, it’s easy to see yourself as a „technology person“ and not as a „creative person“, even if you did some work in the past that would qualify as „creative“.

But some months ago there was this idea I had for a video game and that idea never left me. In my mind, it sounded both interesting enough and realizable in terms of scope and technical difficulty. It still took me months and multiple attempts to finally sit down and start prototyping it.

I am now about one year into developing it in my spare time and about half a year into developing it with my full-time job reduced to a part-time job. The amazing thing is that although the game still feels only about 10% complete, I am convinced I already overcame the biggest hurdle: seriously trying at all.

So why starting this blog and why now? There are two major points to that. One, it forces me to slowly getting used to the fact that–hopefully–one day this game will be put out into the world for everybody to see.

And, two, sooner or later I will need some collaborators and since I am a nobody in the world of video game creation, I will have something to point to once I am contacting potential co-creators.

So I will use this blog as some kind of devlog but not one that is primarily about technical topics. Instead, I try to reflect on higher level questions which arise during the development of the game such as design and design philosophy questions.

But what will the game be about? Obviously, I don’t want to spoil too much this early, but this post already contains one little teaser: the shape at the top (and on the homepage) is the player avatar as currently implemented in the game.

Stay tuned.

– Thomas