Hello everyone. I’m Steve. And this is me embarking on a journey that I’d like to capture and share with you. This will be the place I share my thoughts, experiences, updates and stories every week as I hopefully make progress on a new project I am embarking on. 

I’m putting this together as a record not only for my future self, but for anyone who wants to follow along. I’ve spent a lot of time watching other people embark and thrive making projects of their own. Even if this only inspires one other person to start that one project they’ve always wanted to, then it’s done the job. 

But first a little on me. I’m Steve, and I live near London, with my beautiful wife, my amazing baby daughter and our two lovely cats. They are my inspiration, and I’m continuing to work on myself to be the best version I can be for them. I’m a System Engineer working in the aerospace industry. 

I’ve recently made some big changes in my life: I’ve given up drinking, I’ve taken some time away from playing video games in my free time, and I’m working on my mental health. To provide me with an outlet, I’ve been looking for a new challenge to apply myself that will allow me to focus my creative attention on while also allowing me some flexibility to spend more time with my family, while still having my own thing, even something that I can do while spending time with them.

That brings me nicely to my project. About a year ago, late one restless night I had some ideas for a video game. I made some hasty notes on my phone, poured all my ideas out and then tried to get some sleep. The following morning I looked over them, some ideas I thought were great, some not so much. But nothing much came of it.

A few weeks later, on my commute drive to work, I started to think about one of these ideas. I dictated notes while driving for a few weeks on a video game, a 2D cosy game where the player uses systems engineering principles to make items. I spilled out ideas of mechanics, gameplay, art styles, lore and many many more spiralling thoughts. 

Then life got busy, I lost my job, got a new job and we had our daughter. The idea sessions had been fun, but the notes fell into the pit of other abandoned projects. 

It’s probably worth saying here: I love video games, I have since I was a child. But I have zero experience in anything close to video game development. I’ve had some light experience with coding in my day job, I know some software tools and some programming I’ve seen used here and there. 

But even as I write this now, still have no experience, and very little understanding of what it will truly take to make a full video game. After the first idea run, I’d done some research. Started a bit of coding courses, but fell off due to life’s hurdles. 

That brings us to last week, where I once again found myself travelling for work. In a moment of nostalgia, I remembered the idea sessions from a year ago and dug out some notes. I could see the promise in my ideas, and started to again build a little on them. 

This time though I told myself I wouldn’t give up. My lack of skills wouldn’t stop me. And with a little bit of planning, and some more thinking on the ideas, I’d finally found a game I’d wanted to build. The Inventor. A cosy game about inventing items, machines and projects throughout history. 

That’s all I want to say on the game for now, but it’s something I think I’d have loved to come across as a player.  

So that brings me to now. For a Development journal this doesn’t contain much development, but I wanted to share the beginning of my journey with you. In future journals I expect I’ll have more progress and more things to share, but for now I can share the small milestones I’ve made this week:

• I’ve started building a repository using Obsidian to better map out my game ideas, and started to try and capture how I want the game to work, and how I want the player to feel playing the game.
• I’ve set up this blog to act as a log for myself, and as a place to share my journey. That included setting up a website, yet another new thing for me, but I’ve done it and here we are. I’ve also never written a blog or anything close to that before.
• I’ve chosen to build this game in the Godot game engine, so have started to look at tutorials, and anything I can find on Godot. If anyone has some good resources for this please free to share them with me! 
• I’ve been scouring YouTube for game development videos, looking for tips and advice. Again, with my lack of experience I’ll take anything anyone has as advice or guidance. It’s better than I’ve got now! 
• I’ve seen a lot online about starting small, replicating small games or building very basic games. I don’t want to do that. I know that will take the spark out of it for me. So I plan to start learning Godot by building small prototypes for the systems in my game, and even when learning always be building on something that one day may be used in the final version of the Inventor. 

So I think that’s all I have to say for my first post. I’m excited with where this could go, excited to be sharing this journey with anyone who wants to follow along, nervous for the amount of work I know I’ll have to put in, but motivated to make a start. Hopefully I’ll have some good first updates next week on my progress. If you have any tips or suggestions for me, or even just want to say hello please feel free to comment below. 

Until then,
All the best
Steve