I am developing a game

Over the past few years, I've noticed a certain behavior in myself: I want too much. I'd like to write more, not just technically, but also other forms of writing. And I love making music, both with my band and privately. I listen to a lot of different music and often think: I want to do something like that. And I watch movies and series and then think about the story or the mood, or both: I want to do that too. And I like programming small and large tools and hacks and the like.

The time we all have at our disposal is finite. Viewed as a whole and in relation to the day. I can't do everything, I tell myself over and over again. Programming, writing, music, telling stories. I have to make decisions and set limits...

But that's not true at all!

Like so many of us who work with computers today, the moment that sparked our interest lies in childhood. When asked why they became developers, the answer is often that they loved computer games as a child and wanted to build one themselves.

Most of us learned to program, but never followed through with the idea of creating a computer game. I was no exception.

Sitting in front of my Amiga in the late 80s, I'd always wanted to program my own games. But I didn't know how. The little bit of Basic I had managed to master didn't help. Later, when I could build websites, I tried it somehow, but it didn't go well.

Then I did an apprenticeship and learned programming, and when we were able to choose a project ourselves to program and then submit, I thought about writing a game.

Battleship was it back then. Built with Delphi. A multiplayer game over the network! I was pretty proud of that; I was even able to add PC speaker sound with just a few lines of assembly code. My first functioning game!

A while ago, I was sitting there thinking that I couldn't do everything at once: programming, telling stories, making music. Then I thought back and realized: yes, I can!

What I've always wanted to do, programming a game, combines exactly that. It needs a story, it needs music and atmosphere, it needs someone to program the stuff.

So, three years ago, while on vacation, I started with a few notes. I wrote down what I'd like to play, noted down the mechanics, etc.

Up until then, I had programmed a few games with Phaser. Simply because I wanted to try it out. It went okay, but it was nowhere near the level I was aiming for.

Two years ago, I started exploring Godot. A game engine that has become quite popular in recent times. And what it can do!

And so I spend an evening or two every few days working on my game. Of course, I didn't start small; I immediately took on a project that was far too big. And that's why I now build a multiplayer game.

A few days ago, I "finished" all the basic mechanics. Players can walk across a map, they can place buildings. These buildings then do things when players are within range. It all runs over the network/internet.

For now, these are mostly colorful blocks because I'll probably despair of creating good-looking graphics. But we'll see. I'm approaching the project similarly to other programming jobs: First, the basic technology has to work.

Since I've been delving deeper into the whole topic, new game ideas have been constantly coming to me. I have to restrain myself from constantly changing the game's concepts to incorporate new ideas. Instead, I'll probably build smaller games to test certain techniques or figure out how to release such a game.

My big game project will probably be with me for a long time. I've now reached a point where I have enough knowledge to work on it at a reasonable pace. I'm no longer constantly digging through documentations and forums to understand things.

Therefore, I'll probably write more often about what I'm doing in the future. I'm creating a separate category for this so that these topics can be filtered if they are of particular interest or of no interest at all.

This is what it looks like right now:

I told you: blocks.

Right now, I'm still having a lot of fun with all this, and I'm making good progress, even if it doesn't look like it. We'll see how long that lasts and whether I can squeeze in some smaller games to try things out.

Since my time is limited, it will probably take me forever, but that's okay, I think. So, in the future, there will be some insights from this world here as well. And now excuse me, I still have a multiplayer bug to fix.