Talkyn

So I wanna make games...

I've played video games from Treasure Mountain to Doom since my parents invested in a 286.  I remember when we bought Mario is Missing and didn't have enough space on our once-title 'enormous' 2MB HDD.  This is to say, I've been playing and enjoying video games for as long as I can remember.  For some time less than this, but still for far too long, I've wanted to make games.  It started when I stumbled onto roguelikes by way of ADOM.  Here I saw a game genre that wrapped up a lot of the exprience of DnD in a package that seemed, at the time, very achiveable.  After all, I wouldn't have to create artwork and Thomas was only 16 when he started making it.  Sadly, this never seemed to get off the ground.  I often sought encouragement from those around me, but never found it.

I remember starting to learn Python--way before it was well-known--and being discouraged by everyone around me.  "Just learn C++ or Java," was the advice of the time.  Compared to Python, these languages were indimadating to the extreme.  At the same time, around middle school, I was beginning to look for a trajectory in life.  For personal and family reasons, university and college seemed entirely out of the question, and, despite my obvious natural intrests in computing, most teachers and family told me that the tech boom had already passed and that is was an overcrowded and underpaid industry that always required a hard-earned degree.  Mine is the story of what happens when you let others tell you how your should persue your life.

Discouraged and aimless after high school, I worked a pointless dead-end job in retail for fifteen years.  During this time, a marvelous women thought I was worth a damn.  We lived together, travelled Europe together, married, and had a child (now three of them).  Fatherhood forced me to face all manner of buried and ignored feelings of inadequacy.  I eventually grew the courage to trust mys own abilities and go find an employer that would think I was worth a damn.  

I'd always been clever with machinery and mechanisms, and been more than handy with a computer.  Somehow, I landed a job as a robotics service technician.  I was the first employee ever hired without a formal education.  In less than two years, I was a team lead responsible for training and outcomes of a service department.  After five years of working overtime, being on-call, being even more on-call to help my junior technicians, I'd had enough.  I worked out a new job description as full time IT for the company I already worked for.  Finally, I was doing what I always wanted; I was working with computers.  Not only that, but I realized I was the only person that had ever been in the way of doing what I wanted.

During all of this, I would somtimes get the itch to make a game.  I have a dozen notebooks and binders filled with ideas, mechanics, formulas for damage and skill progress, very bad pencil sketches, characters, storylines, psudo-code, etc.  I can't count how many times I started learned Ogre3D, Blender, Unity, Pygame, MonoGame or even SDL.  I was always in a position where I had to (felt I had to) put family or career needs  ahead of any hobbies.  Finally, this has changed.  I've secured a strong career path.  Finally, I feel like I am direclty in control of where my life goes.

I've pulled out and dusted off as many old game notebooks as I can find and started yet another.  I've scoured the internet for guides and resources and settled on Godot as the engine to use these days.  I've moved past the personal barriers of feeling like video games are a waste of time I want to create.  If I can give the experiences I felt when playing ADOM, my first true favourite game, to even just one person, I'll feel like I've succeeded.  

Here's to the next part of the journey.