The Fool

As the tarot of the same name, I begin my journey in amateur game design with little knowledge of the pitfalls and dangers to come, but with a naive optimism to light the way.  Okay, that's a load of crap.  I spent 3 years in college learning to design and program, and have yet to put those skills to use. I know how tedious the work can be.  I have a vague understanding of just how much work needs to be put in to make a game work well.  I'm doing this initially on my own, with a handful of friends who may be able to help me with it as time progresses.  However, here and now, the firmament that needs to be laid for my coming project... well, that all relies on me.  I am the Fool for believing it is possible.  And as The Fool, I accept that my road will be perilous from the first step.  However, this fool is not going to look backwards in dismay.  I welcome the dangers, I welcome the pain, and I welcome the challenge.

Prior to this posting, I've identified some the core issues that prevented me from making meaningful progress on previous ideas:

• Attention problems
• Getting so caught up in minutiae that I lose focus on the main goal
• Allowing myself to be overwhelmed by the enormity of a project.

So, I've decided to address some of these issues in my own creative way.  I'm going to start in the shallows, so to speak.  That is, I'm going to run with the basics and work to establish the necessary stuff before getting bogged down by details.  It's like getting so caught up in how your socks look with your shoes that you leave the house in your undies.  A bit embarassing and not conducive to finishing anything.

The first few issues on the plate are finding a decent engine to run a game in.  Currently I'm looking at Unity 3d, partly because what I'm working on presently lacks the power to run UDK.  So sue me.  Unity seems solid enough for my purposes.  There are plenty of free tools available for game design if you're really interested enough to pursue it.

Secondly, corollary to the first, is the issue of designing the items to place inside the game, from character models to scenery, landscapes, textures, and miscellaneous other things.  While I am generally artistically inclined and trained in 3d modeling, I will not yet claim to be professionally experienced in that particular field.  I like to sketch, but haven't made a living off of it, and I'm terribly out-of-date with regards to my deviant art page.  As far as music... well... pray to whatever deity you believe in, and consider yourself warned.  3d design work I'm doing via Blender, a free tool that has updated it's user interface and provided a good series of introductory tutorials to familiarize new users.  It's pretty close to what I was trained on in school, and I should be able to crank out a few useful goodies to get started with.

As far as time... suffice it to say I'll be rather happy when trying to find free time to work on this project becomes an issue.  One aspect I hope to explore on this blog, as time goes by, is the various issues I face as an amateur game designer and the problems I come across, as they happen (no I'm not on Twitter and I don't intend to 'tweet' my problems literally as they appear).  It won't all be bad, I'll also show my successes as they appear, too, but often the challenges far exceed the successes they generate.  Just life and all.

Thank you all for reading; I hope to provide more content regularly.


tl;dr version for the attention-impaired:

bite me, read the above or buzz off, kthx.