First year of Game Development

 Introduction

 On 15 March 2020, I had made my first terrain in Unity. And by March 15, 2021, I had released my first demo on itch.io Hello everyone, I know it's been a while, but today I'd love to share with you, What I learned after 1 Year, of Game Development.

 And to the new comers, welcome to VandaGreen Studios.

March - Learning About the Indie Game Industry

 So in this month I did mainly 3 things. Come up with a game idea with a hook, Gather software and most important learn about the industry. For the game idea, this wasn't really hard. Cause I already a list of Ideas in mind. But I had to pick a small game idea that I could manage, but really grow in future. This proved difficult because most of ideas were all too story based and didn't have an approach which were similar to games like angry birds.

However, some ideas were just in the idea phase so I picked out one that seemed, small to me at that time.

 On the Software part, fortunately I already had most of the software except for an IDE. I had downloaded visual studio community which was heavily performant on my PC and really troublesome to work with offline so after a few hours of google nonsense I found visual studio code and the balanced was restored.

 And the most important part. Allow me to say that I live in a country where the game industry is really "coming when its ready." So I spent the last 10 years now, cultivating a dream of a career path that doesn't really exist in my environment or society yet.

 I realized that all I knew about the game industry was just games, and not the people that made them, how they work, how they think and any other aspect involved in the game industry. So it's safe to that even to this day I haven't stopped researching about the game industry, and you should too.

 So first thing to do is to know just what you're getting into. It gives you a very strong sense of footing, especially if you want to figure out how to stand out from the rest of the crowd. I can't recommend it enough, research about the industry you want to enter before you make a scene. And don't stop researching.

April and May - Learning Stuff

 

 So I had the software, the game idea and some frisky knowledge about the industry. And I didn't start my game just yet, I kept it in my head, Why? Well I have software, but I have to learn how to use them of course.

 So I first started with unity. Learning the interface, the asset store (which by the way, was massive game changer for me), the different windows and stuff like that. I then later on followed the Brackeys How to make a game tutorials series and after a day I had made my first game which to this day no one has ever completed it.

 Except for me and my little bro.

 After that the only thing I did was sculpt terrains repeatedly. I just love making landscapes. I was already quite comfortable with photoshop since I had been learning since 2018. However, with blender was the real struggle.

 I've been struggle to learn since I was 13 and why? I'll explain on another post. But I did try learning blender again and after a a few videos I was able to play around with the shapes to make some furniture.  And again due to reasons I'll explain in another video I decided to pause on learning blender and use Unity's Probuilder for the meantime.

 For learning code. Since I was Learning Unity I had to learn C#. I decided to stick with Brackeys again. Taking my time learning one video a day. Two weeks later I was done with the tutorial series and I was completely burned out from all the learning. I ended up spending the last two weeks taking a break. It was this time I discovered something happening to me. One that would lead on a road to hell.

 

 So now I knew about Unity, and learned about basic code, I planned to test my newly found skills. In that 2 weeks of may I reviewed my progress and realized that the "small" game I wanted to make was still too big for me. It had far too many things that I wasn't ready for even though I removed quite a lot from it.

 It was also evident, that I was still not patient enough to spend so much time making this game. So I dropped it for later.

June - The Self Game Jam

 Sticking to realistic goals I decided to game jam myself in the June. I would make four games in four weeks. I came up with four different games of four different genres for practice and see which one would be loved best. I picked a puzzle game, a simulation, comedy...I don't know genre, (no wonder it failed), fighting game, and a racing game. This was the moment of truth indeed.

 The First week of June I started the Game Jam. I first picked a puzzle game which I called Mighty Maze and work from everyday from 8 to 8... I struggled to find something mighty about until Friday when I was working on background sound when the solution struck me like lightning to its Rod.

 Escape the maze with sound. I finished it and gave the kids to play and it was received well You won't believe how happy I was to finish my first game.

 The second game was the IDK genre which I called House Arrest. I couldn't bring it to what it was meant to be but I used a way to learn some new techniques I couldn't do in the 3 months I spent learning Unity and code. I managed to finish the game but and the audience didn't like it so much either.

 The third was to be a fighting game but unfortunately, this never happened because I burned out completely from the two previous games. Just like May, I ended spending the last two weeks on a break.

 This should have been a warning sign for the future but I was ignorant then. Regardless, I knew I had to pick one of the games I made that would take me to knew heights.

 Before I mention the winner, Allow me to say that I also tweaked the rollaball game I and let the kids play it as well. And no the still couldn't win. Anyway, I asking all who played my games which one would be the winner. Mighty Maze won by a landslide.

July and August - Birth of an ego

 Sometimes excitement can lead to unforeseen events. In July I started making a fifth bonus city level to add to the demo. It was going to be 9x bigger than the forest level, and 9x9 times bigger than the first two levels. This was my most ambitious and biggest project yet. Progress was moving pretty smoothly. and once in a while I would something on my social media pages if I felt like it.

By the end month I had finished the basic setup for my city level and I had to do now, was turn it to a maze. At this point however, everything went dark, And I grew tired and I was haunted by my fate.

 I felt incredible need to improve my skills. So I paused on the project and went back to the entirely free academy that is YouTube and picked on whatever tutorials I could find worth learning. This went on for a month and it was so much more engaging than before. Experience does make a difference.

 It's great to take a break and learn some new stuff once in while. Especially if it's help you on your project. But it's not enough when your ego becomes dangerously inflated.

September to November - The Mental

 I was walking on deep waters here. I grew too big in the head and developed feature which is the excessive ongoing expansion or addition of attributes or aspects in a product. In addition, I also had adventurous plans for my studio growth. I planned for a website, social media, and YouTube channel. I aimed to launch my studio on all these platforms and make millions with my demo.

 But instead all I did was a huge heap load of action faking which is, the illusion of progress by pretending to very busy throughout the day. school assignments, social media, website, YouTube, game dev, my studio, I was hurting myself in a terrifying way.

 The demo itself lost it's identity as I kept on thinking of what I can add to the project and I was slowly losing it. Aside from that, I had been harsh on myself because I wanted a lot from my passion. Till one day in the middle of November...

 I was still way over my head and made a decision to upgrade the project's pipeline from the Standard Render Pipeline to Universal Render Pipeline when... All my 4 months of hard work, gone in a blink of an eye. And then it smacked me right in the face.

 "This was all a stupid idea. I should have listened I'll. I'll never accomplish anything meaningful in my life. Shame on me. Told you so, but wouldn't listen. Look who's high and mighty now. You weren't meant to be nothing, Dreams never come true."

 I spent days going through these voices inside my head. I thought I could control myself, my desperation for money, fame, a sense of leadership and a great desire to prove a point to I don't know to this day. I thought I was in control but I was far from that. But the biggest question I asked myself was

 Is it all over?

Burned out, frustrated and just plain sad, I didn't know what to anymore. Maybe I should just quit Game Develo... Wait.

 I've come too far to just quit like this. I had spent the last 9 years dreaming of doing this and I quit just like this? This is definitely not something worth quitting for. But worth fighting for.

December and January 2021 - The Remake

 December finally arrived, I was a new man, I renamed my studio, I started the project from scratch but unlike before, I was more focused and took better care of myself. I also abandoned that toxic thoughts nonsense, including my desperation for money, and my terrible overworking habits.

 I would show you the work from here but why here when you can watch from my YouTube Channel. If you are interested. You can go straight to by clicking here and watch till your heart's content.

 So by 1 and a half months later, what took me 4 months and got me practically nowhere, was finished and far much better than before. In addition I had a website running on blogger and a strong satisfaction of getting out the toxic world of self-help. I launched the demo on itch.io and only available on windows right now. 

February 2021 and March 2021 - Next Step

 So here I am now, finished a playable demo, have a website and happiness I can't describe. I'm on break at the moment. Deciding on if should remaking the Rollaball game, or head into the world of FPS. Meanwhile, The wars on blender will eventually come to an end and I'll conquer it for sure. And instead of approaching photorealism, I'm taking hands at toon shading, and many other exiting I want to achieve in future.

Conclusion

 So this the end of the post. if you made all the way here, you are awesome. I really can't find words to describe how awesome you are if you made it this far. Also if have something you wanna say for example, something about my experience or if you'd like your first experience in following your passions. You can leave it in the comments.

 Alright guys, Thanks so much again for reading and I'll see you next time.