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All posts for the month July, 2024

So a few years ago… I wish it were just a few years ago… I went back to colleges after being “laid off” from my previous job that I didn’t realize how much I hated until I was “laid off” from it. During this second trip to college I took classes to try and become a video game designer. Honestly I feel I am more in line with story development and took classes more in line with that but at the same time here I learned to code and learned the basics of game design and the Unity Game Engine.

Unity was a great system, free to use, easy to use, and had many tutorials on how to develop for the system. And then a couple of years ago Unity did something really stupid and made it so everyone hated them, which I honestly don’t blame them.

So lately I have been trying to learn Godot. Godot is very similar to Unity but it is open source and constantly being developed. Recently right after the Unity debacle they added support for C# which is what all of Unity is programmed in, but honestly looking at how Godot does things I think it might be slightly better in some aspects just behind due to being newer than Unity.

Anyway I have had two games that I have been wanting to make for years now.

A Steampunk inspired Metroidvania

A Tactics game inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics, which I feel is by far the best tactical RPG out there.

I don’t really want to go into too much detail about them here, I already have plenty of notes on them that constantly change when I think of something new. But I honestly think my issue really is I hesitate to start. I don’t know exactly where to begin. Well I know exactly where I begin, I’m the story guy so I come up with story and ideas on how to play and see the game, but after that point I hesitate cause I either try to do too much at once or don’t do anything beyond planning.

What normally happens to me with creative endeavors is this: I come up with an idea, plan it out, get as much detail as I can to get a good start, and then will go to the next step… and then there’s five steps. I need the art so I can see the character in the style that I am trying to learn how to program which I need tutorials for cause I don’t know how this new system deals with characters like this and oh look at this idea maybe I should change the whole story why I go play and tweek that a bit since I can’t seem to do anything programming wise…

I just exhaust myself in the planning and preplanning and the learning that I never get anything more than a few notes and a test game opened and barely started.

My therapy has been helping me feel better about myself and feel better about doing things in general but I still can’t get the drive to just continue doing, and that drive tends to make it at this point a “Well you know you aren’t going to do anything so why bother even starting, why not play that mind numbing game you like instead.”

This is honestly what I wanted therapy to help me with. I suppose I should try meditation to calm my mind, which she suggests, but I don’t know how well that will actually work for me. And those doubts are what are preventing me from doing anything.

Cyan

Recently I got a new computer thanks to my roommate. He noticed that my PC had very little hard drive space on my C drive and that I was asking for better graphics so I could play more modern games so he decided that he wanted an upgrade too and helped me create a new PC. He bought a better graphics card for himself and a bigger C drive for my PC and then transferred his older graphics card to my PC.

So far it’s been great except I had to get slightly bigger and newer monitors for my new PC, you know better graphics require better monitors. So I got those as well and set everything up. All the stuff came on a Friday so couldn’t get anything set up in time for my normal D&D game Friday nights, then also slightly interrupted my Saturday game as I figured out how the hell Windows 11 worked. But for the most part got the hang of it.

Now I’ve had the new PC for a couple of months by this point and I do love it. Windows 11 is still a pain making things that were easy in Windows 10 more complicated but for the most part it’s just something I ignore as most everything else is just that same.

I do love the new PC though and well besides just getting an upgrade the main reason that I wanted it right now was more because I got the PC version of Horizon Forbidden West with the DLC Burning Shores. Since I never got a PS5 and have no plans on doing so I figured this was so far the only real game that I wanted to get on the system and a lot of the other games I like tend to be ported over to PC anyway so why get an exclusive system. I mean the real reason I got a PS3 when they came out was because they were actually the cheapest version of a Bluray player and why bother getting one machine that can just do that when you can get a game system that can also play Bluray for the same price. PS4 was just because better quality games and at that point PC and Console still had a major separation.

But yeah so I tore through Horizon: FW and BS in fact last weekend, Sunday played through all of BS in one evening. I didn’t do a lot of the sidequests by the end and may go back but probably not since I did pass FW on the PS4. RIght now though it has inspired me to start thinking about and trying to work on my own games again… Which will be my next blog post

Cyan