The First Real Post

I finished the bulk of the work needed for my website about a month ago. Since then I have been working on my other project, Varkor, but progress has been slow because of a lot of set up work that I needed to do. A vast majority of this set up work is done, but set up work is never truly done. I am just pleased with what I have now.

Yesterday, I was thinking about my goals and where I am trying to end up, but a question popped into my head, "How will I maintain the website if I intend on putting my focus on other projects?" I can't divert tons of time to the website if it's not my primary focus. I need to focus on the projects that I am very serious about working on first and foremost.

When I first finished the website framework stuff, it felt a little strange because I was a bit unsure about what I would use it for. After completing it, my first thought was that I would be posting about some of the technical deep dives that I would be going on in the future. Unfortunately, good posts that do this are very high effort and will take quite some time to complete. Since I don't want to be dedicating so much time to this, I need to do something different with this blog.

An idea that I am quite fond of struck me while comtemplating: I can actually stick to what a blog is and use this as one. Now that I am working for myself, I am not sharing my work with anyone except for my girlfriend and the friends that happen to see. My goal is to change that by sharing what I have been working on once a week here. Essentially, I am doing a written stand-up meeting where I am the only person talking about what I did. Instead of being just for me or a team of people, it's for everyone to see if they wish to read it.

I figure this form of blogging will do a few things. One, it will hold me accountable for the things I want to get done. I don't want to come to the day where I write about my accomplishments and not have anything to write. Two, it provides a space for reflection about my work where I can truly consider what I have accomplished and think about the path I am on. If you work on a project and you don't reflect on where the project is and is going (and whether you actually like the thing you made), I think you're sort of doomed to fail. Especially the liking it part. If you don't like your own project, that's a significant issue. Three, it gives me a history that isn't a git log about the work I have done. That just makes it a nice thing to look back on in the future and hopefully learn from. Four, I can begin to get more comfortable sharing my work with random people. This website acts as a place where I can share things with anybody and even though I believe very few, if any, people will read this, posting here still feels like I am sharing something with a lot of people. If I ever intend on being a person that inspires others to follow their passions, I need to get comfortable with sharing my words and I need to get good at it.

So, as this is the first post, I am going to put down a little history leading up to now. Some of this may come across as very brief, but time is a weird thing. I will be writing these every Monday. It's Tuesday now, but I just got the idea yesterday so I am writing it now. I might change that if it proves to be too much, but for now it's a good starting point.

Some History

I attended DigiPen as a game design student. After a year, I realized that degree path wasn't for me and I switched to a programming degree instead. During my last summer in Redmond, I interned at SpaceX for a few months and it had a major effect on how I code. I finished college at DigiPen with a programming degree a bit more than a year and a half ago. After graduating, I instantly flew over to Germany to be with my girlfriend and found a job at an indie studio. At first, things were good. I was finally living somewhere that wasn't the US and I was working at an indie.

As time went on, I became depressed working at the studio. The game being worked on seemed like a great idea when I got there, but as time went on, I disliked the project more and more. The company's publisher did some questionable things: putting the game on steam's upcoming games list when it wasn't an upcoming game and boosting view counts on the youtube trailer video. These actions left a very bad taste in my mouth and convinced me that the publishing company really didn't have much of a clue about what they were doing.

Additionally, development on the game was painfully slow. The team I was working with didn't really have many good practices. They rarely, if ever, prototyped. They often discouraged it because it takes too much time (yet development was slow because they aren't willing to dedicate time to figuring out what is and isn't a good idea). They never did any live playtesting to watch players play and react to the game for the same reason (bogus thinking imo). Suggestions from members of the team often seemed to get ignored. This led to people not really caring about the game's direction because a select few were in charge of it. In fact, multiple people that work in the studio had difficulty understanding the game they were working on. Some of the work culture was just straight up fucking toxic. Then corona came around. I never thought this would happen, but the amount of resistance I met when encouraging working from home was…, impressively sad. It was like all of the things I learned at DigiPen through experience (not because a professor told me) weren't embraced there and I just couldn't bear it anymore.

To make matters a bit worse, I wasn't even enjoying the work I was doing there. I enjoy working on more low level things. Working on graphics, audio, physics, etc. are much more appealing subjects to me over game programming. I gained a huge appreciation for that type of work during my time in college and not doing it anymore left a big hole in my heart. After a year and a half, I was so fed up with the environment, the game, and my work that I quit to pursue my own endeavours.

It has been two months since I have left that job and a decent amount has happened in that time, but less than I would like. During the first couple of weeks, I did basically nothing. Just the usual Rocket League, going on long walks, and other fun activities to get my mind off of things. I began to get restless after two weeks though and the first thing I wanted to do was remake my website. I did that and wrote about it here I got to learn a lot about javascript and I was proud of finally doing that.

After that, my next project has been Varkor. I didn't do so much at the beginning of August, but a lot more towards the end. The code I started with actually came from a different project I started for the Global Game Jam six months ago. Since all the code was mine and I didn't release any of it because I didn't finish what I wanted to, I had no objections to using the code I had written during that weekend as the start of the project.

Instead of writing code for the last couple of weeks though, the only thing I've really been doing is figuring out the build system and dev environment I will be using for the project. It's a game engine, so it needs to run and build on native Windows. Unfortunately, I really like vim, tmux, and command line. These things, as much as I wish they would get in a room and make out with each other, don't like each other at all (I mean Windows and everything else).

So during the past two weeks, I figured out how I could build Varkor from command line using CMake with Ninja. I use the mintty, tmux, and vim distributions that come with cygwin, so getting this all to work was actually a real pain in the ass. I have it working now though. I can build the project as debug 32 or 64, or release 32 or 64 under msvc. The debug executables tell me if there are memory leaks thanks to the CRT library. After getting that done, I worked on fleshing out some more of the input code to handle all key presses and mouse button presses.

And that's where I am at now. While all of this is happening, I have also been really striving to learn piano and German. German at the moment is just a lot of vocabulary memorization and getting extremely confused by the order of words. Piano has been a mix of training my coordination on the instrument and training my ear to quickly recognize intervals. I can pretty quickly recognize diatonic intervals now, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done there. Progress on that endeavour is slow, but I hope that it will pay off in the long run because I dream of being able to play an instrument at a high level and the piano is by far my favorite due to it's versatilaty. I am also beginning to record my progress once a week on that front as well. Hopefully looking back on it years from now will feel very rewarding.

That's all for now, until next week.

See you space cowboy…

PS

I am not going to mention my eventual goals. I want to keep that a surprise for when I get there. It's about the journey, not the destination, duderino.