The Path to Making Games

My average day consists of going to “The Day Job”, then sprinting back home to make video games until I wake up with a keyboard stuck to my face. I look forward to the weekends, to lock myself away in the office. I’ll grind out updates to Super Panda, prototype my RPG and think up cool things for Super Panda 2. It’s vexxing and challenging, but this is what I love doing. Although robbing me of 60 hours a week, the day job does pay the bills and leave enough left over to run the website and spend on the Unity Asset store. For that I can’t complain.

This week’s focus has been prototyping my RPG. When it comes down to RPG games, I’m old school. We’re talking Kobolds, Goblins, Lizard monsters and Orcs. I’d even love to toss in the rarely ever seen Draconian, but I believe whoever owns D&D this week would want to have an angry word with me. One can dream.

I also have Beholders, Golem, imps, devils, skeleton hoards and all sort s of other fun things to go “Bump” in the night and haunt your dreams. There’s also a few evil and sadistic traps strewn about. Bring a rogue or you’ll find yourself impaled on a spike trap, or burned to a crisp. There’s a lot missing in modern RPG games and I’d like to find our roots, our heritage and bring it back.

How I’m making it happen

Not being much of an artist, I’ve tossed in a few thousand $$ buying art assets over the past year.  Even if I were, as a solo gig, it could take 2-3 years on character creation alone. So I had to make that decision to focus on the core elements of the game. Programming the game mechanics, level design, story board and marketing. Sounds like a lot right? It sure is. But I love doing it.

I also delve into a multitude of courses on Udemy to keep learning, keep growing. It’s amazing how many awesome courses there are out there. Ben Tristem, Gary Simmons and so many other brilliant instructors sharing their wisdom. I’m no expert, but with their help I’m getting there, little b y little.

There’s a But…

Here’s that dreaded caveat… Time is my most critically limited resource. To succeed I need more time, that would mean more funding. So my plan is to release both Super Panda 2 and the RPG in a small, 5-10 hour length game. For Panda, possibly 10-15 levels.

I started my path in mobile as a quick way to get games out there to a massive market space. It was a stretching exercise to learn valuable skills in order to kick start my grand vision: Steam and Console releases.

So money is needed. It’ll buy back time and grant me the ability to focus 100% on making games and AI research. Yeah, I love AI (been studying it for 15+ years now) and have something gaming planned for that in the future as well.

Thank you for reading and enjoy the more frequent updates.