WeirdBeard's Blog

Reluctant Protagonist

So I recently got a quest for a crazy, wild-haired troll and in the last six days I felt like I’m that reluctant character in the story that just sat at the tavern long after he should have gotten moving. Sure I did some stuff this week, but not much game dev.

I happened across a reddit post from a guy, let’s call him Mike (mainly because that’s his name), who also started on his own year long quest to learn coding and game dev. I followed his blog, PAUSED gaming, and have actively commented on his work (this is one of my shortcomings, I’m a huge lurker but don’t comment or interact much on the web). He wrote to his blog everyday, which made me want to write to my blog more often. I plan to write at least once a week, or more often if things develop (haha coder humor). So here’s a shoutout to Mike, thanks for the follow, and helping me get out of the tavern and to truly start my quest. Good luck on your journey!

Do You Want To Build a Game?

I have played some form of Dungeons and Dragons since I was 14, both tabletop and computer-based. I always enjoyed roleplaying games, hence the “on a quest” analogy. When I first taught myself how to code, I wanted to build a Bard’s Tale I clone. I even started on the clone and for months I slaved over the keyboard, churning the best spaghetti BASIC code I could muster. If I remember correctly, I developed the capability to create a character, save it to disk, and reload it, all in my very own Adventurer’s Guild. Somewhere along the way I learned to code C128 assembly language so I could speed up the game. To really paint the scene here, I did this in the late 80s with no Internet; I only had the trusty library to help me and whatever magazine I scrounged up. But I did it, I discovered how to integrate assembly language into my BASIC and started making great strides in speeding up my game. Ahh, now I had power!

I mentioned I was 14 when I started this journey right (and yes a very geeky 14)? Well, by the time I turned 16, I got a driver’s license and high school life happened. For some reason (it couldn’t have been the partying, I’m sure of that 😉 ) I never did finish that game. Then I joined the Navy, got married, raised a kid, and got numerous jobs as a developer. As I approach the prime of my life (turning 47 in April), my inner child still wants to create that game.

The Second Step Followed the First

I took my first step last week and posted The Quest Begins. I took my second step today and decided on what to create, and shocker, I will create an RPG in the vein of Bard’s Tale, Vaporum, Legends of Grimrock, and Operencia. I messed around with Unity on and off over the past few years and I already know C#, so it sounds like a great fit. In fact, I bought Grid Move on the Unity Asset Store awhile back and I reverse engineered and refactored the code to better myself with Unity.

Grid Move provided me the basic movement of the dungeon crawler but it doesn’t have a player character interface, monsters, inventory, treasure, or really anything else. My quest has purpose! I know my first goal, to design and build a player character interface. Stay tuned to see who (or what) will join me on my quest.

Keep on questing!