A Week of Powering Up

I still haven't jumped into a game project yet, but I do feel I've had a really productive week, despite a few distractions.

I've been spending some time playing around with Blender, as I planned, though not nearly as much as I would have liked.

Here are a few of the things I put together, as you can see I took some things further than others.

I also spent a bit of one day down in Cork city centre in the open work space for start-ups called Workbench. It turned out to be a really nice space and I got some really good brainstorming done for a game, even though I was just there for an hour or so. When I'm fully in production on a game, I think I will try to spend two or three days a week down there as it really was a nice space where you had no distractions and could use their facilities.

Next week I'll mostly be making ready for the big game jam next weekend. I might do a game on my Oculus Quest, so I'll ensure that I have my laptop set up for VR development for it.

A Week of Vacation

My girlfriend was off this week, so we spent this week relaxing together. We both needed some recharging I think, but especially my girlfriend.

So I have not been very productive this week, though I have done a bit. I've mostly been playing around with Blender and then I've been reading a lot. I've finished reading the second book of short stories in the Witcher series "The Sword of Destiny" and I got a good ways into reading "David Copperfield".

I've signed up for a weekend long game jam in Dublin in two weeks, so I'll be going up and staying in a hostel for the duration. Until then, I'm thinking about spending next week playing around with Blender and maybe coming up with a really good entry to the current Blender subreddit competition, since the winning price is an NVidia RTX 2080 Ti GPU. I don't think I would have much chance of winning with my rusty abilities, but it seems a shame not to enter when I have the time and it's good to get some more Blender experience anyway.

So plan for next week will be lots of Blender, lots of reading, some more practical projects around the house and then I'll try to get back to some exercises in "How to Become a Productivity Ninja" which I've also been reading.

A week of winding down

So it's been a week since my last day at Apple and I have been enjoying having some time to just relax and do a few practical things.

This week I've mostly been fixing up our house and getting my office set up to have a nice working space, but I did manage a few productive things during this week as well.

Firstly since I had some more time I got a lot of reading done and read The Forever War by Joe Halderman and whoa what a read that was. I have heard about this book many times before and been meaning to read it, but I was still impressed with it, it's incredible that this has never been turned into a Hollywood blockbuster. I'm not going to go into plot details as I don't want to spoil anything, but suffice it to say that absolutely everyone should read this book, even if you think science fiction is normally dumb or silly, just put that thought out of your mind and read this masterpiece.

Secondly I found some time to play around with Blender. Blender 2.80 is almost out and I've been getting back into it with the beta. I stumbled on some videos showing off Blender's motion tracker and compositor, I had never really realised how full featured these were. So I gave it a go myself with a little video I shot in my backyard and the result was really fun.

Thirdly I also did a bit of drawing one day, something I imaged could fit into the 2D RPG I've been thinking about making.

 So I've been feeling really relaxed and good in general and happy that I've also worked on a few creative projects, even if I haven't jumped fully into my game project yet.

All of next week, my girlfriend will be off work, so that will be our summer vacation, so I don't expect a lot to happen next week.

Going Fulltime

After trying to do game development in my free time for the last 7 years, I'm finally giving up and instead trying to do game developement full time. My last day working for Apple was Friday last week.

This has been something I've wanted to go for ever since I got started, but haven't had the financial stability or the courage to give it a go.

I'm not really sure I have that now either, but I'm giving it a go.

I have some money set aside and I'm hoping to get some tax credits and startup support later in the yest, so with those two things together, I should be ok to work on a game for around a year. Hopefully at that point I'll have something I can either sell or get an investment to keep working on it.

So what game am I going to make? Truth is, I don't really know. Over the last few months I've put quite a bit of work into an idea I had of a turn based 2D sidescroller with a Diablo like loot system. I liked the idea a lot, it was taking a lot of my favourite games and mixing them together, but I think I went too far into designing enemy, loot and ability systems without actually testing out whether the idea of a turnbased combat system where you are only controlling one character works well. As far as I can tell it doesn't, so it's back to the drawing board.
I've also been having a few ideas for VR games, so the first thing I'll do once I'm full time on game development will be a lot of brainstorming and prototyping to find out exactly what I'll be working on.

I've also started game development group and had two meetings with other people interested in game development in Cork. I figured it might simply be fun, but could also be a good way to stay motivated if you had someone to show your progress to.

Meanwhile I've let my webhosting of www.lonelygiantgames.com expire, though I still own the domain. I had way too expensive a hosting package considdering how little I used the homepage. I think for now I will leave it dormant, until I have something new I want to show off.

I'm also really hoping to spend the next few weeks getting a bit inspired. I've lived in Ireland for over eight years and I've seen very little of the country, so I hope to bring my sketchbook and a camera and go exporing the Irish countryside a bit and maybe find some time to read some good books.

This should also mean that this blog will become much more active. I think a weekly or fortnightly update about my game and working on my own, would be a great way for myself to take stock of how things are going.

Wish me luck...