Revelation: How I realised I could become a Game Developer
For a long time, I didn’t think that I could do programming. I don’t know why, but programming always seemed like too high of a skill to achieve. I guess it was associated with maths in my head, and I’d messed up my maths skills by creating card games by this point.
The first opportunity I had to learn programming was in 2016, as part of my ICT class. Unfortunately for me, I was sick that week with a flu, so I completely missed it and never bothered to catch up. The end of year exams came, but fortunately any programming stuff was an optional task that I didn’t do (I made a fun PowerPoint instead)
By this point, I started to become interested in making video games. My friends and I had stopped playing our imagination-based role-playing game (Titled: The Game), but we still remembered all the story and lore we’d created for it. And while we’d stopped playing The Game, we wanted it to live on in some way, so we were exploring avenues to express that story.
I had wanted to become an Author, so I began writing a book. And from this book, one of my friends wanted to turn it into an animation, and the three of us were quickly hooked to that concept. But animating takes time and skill, time and skill that we didn’t quite have.
Eventually, the idea of turning that story into a video game entered my head. It was perfect! Video games would allow for not only the story to be expressed, but for other people to play The Game in their own way! This role-play could get out of our heads and become a digital thing!
There was one problem though. None of us could really code. So I started researching, looking up ways of making a game without code. At this point though, services like Buildbox didn’t exist yet or were in their infancy, and I somehow never came across proper game engines such as Unreal Engine or Unity. So I eventually quit my search and only kept it up on occasion, waiting for a good no-code game engine to arrive.
Instead, I entered the next school year, in September of 2016, and took Computer Science as one of my subjects. And part of the subject was programming.
Initially nervous, I quickly fell in love. Somehow, I found programming to be easy, and soon I was at the top of the class, always slightly ahead, always quick at grasping a concept. I began to pay less and less attention in class, and more time messing around with code. And whenever the teacher would try to catch me out, I’d apparently easily answer the question and get right back to what I was doing (this is a second hand account, I don’t remember this much)
When 2016 began to draw to a close, I got that game making itch again. Rather than take out my notebooks for card making paper, I opened the school computer and got to typing. My first game was called “Traded!” and it was well, a trading simulation game. It’s not very advanced, but my teacher took notice and it sorta came up in my final report as a positive (He’s taken to programming!).
My plan was to continue making this game during the Christmas break. And I would have too, were it not for one minor snag.
My school at the time was teaching Visual Basic 2007 (or 2008 I don’t remember). The only way to edit and then run the code was through a Windows only program that you needed a license for. The problem was: I was using an old Macbook.
This got in my head a little bit. But I found a, *ahem*, workaround for the time being. It did eventually lead me to start a new journey not long after going back to school in January. My idea was to avoid being stuck to one platform that is limiting. So I started to learn Python.
Python was easy for me to grasp, what with its simple syntax and lax rules on type hints. I already knew one language too, so I was treading old ground most of the time. And my online learning propelled me ahead of my class even further. This decision really paid off in the future, since python is one of the languages that the exams allows candidates to use, so I had an easier time then.
The itch came again to make a game, and rather than go back to my trading game, I started a new project. This one would be about hacking! It would also take a really long time to make and would be given up on, but it gave me a good opportunity to practice my python skills.
From 2017 onwards, I realised that as much as I wanted to become an author, I wanted to become a game developer even more. And in my mind, the ability to tell stories through games was an added benefit. So now my mind was set on a path that I’ve been on now. And the itch to make games grew even stronger, so I began to fill it.
