Games

So here's a bit of my personal history with developing games...

I've made a few games over the course of +- 10 years. In the early years, I started with GameMaker and made a bunch of 2D games. This was back when I did not have internet so I mostly showed friends and classmates my achievements. We had some fun with them. I still have the project files for many of them but GameMaker has gone through changes since that time and they do not compile anymore. And the last compiled versions only ran on Windows XP. It looks like a big mission to fix. My games at this time weren't super amazing anyway. Just good for learning :P

After creating 2D games for a while, I decided I wanted to make something more immersive. Inspired by first person shooters with amazing stories at the time, I wanted to make something epic to explore, with scary elements.

I ended up building a 3D shooter with a demo verison of an old game engine. Game engines were expensive back then and I had no money to spend on that kind of thing but I continued to build it in the limited version anyway.

When I finally had a level with a bunch of enemies and some interesting scenery, I got irritated with the engine limitations. I wanted better shadows, lighting and all sorts of things the engine did not provide (due to it being a demo or out of date - can't even remember).

So I took a break. Back then my PC was not the most amazing machine. I remember wanting to play a big new game and my 4GB HDD didn't have enough space to install it. I saw that my game that I had built was taking up a lot of storage space. So I wrote it to a CD and stored that away thinking it would be safe. I then lost the CD for years. Eventually found it but it was destroyed. The datalayer film had half rubbed off. Talk about quite a loss. (At least these days I know about source control, backups - local and cloud, amirite?).

So that was that. All gone. So I decided to start again. This time I'd build the game from scratch - no prebuilt game engine. Remember this was all before Unreal or Unity so this was my only option to get what I wanted.

So I looked at what all the AAA guys were doing. I wanted to build something greater than them. I felt that they were lazy when I found issues in all the popular games (yeah I had no idea how much work it really was and I was clearly full of myself).

So I found C++... and that proceeded to consume my life 😀

Being young and naive, I decided to build a game in this "new" powerful language (which would turn out to mostly building an engine).

I wanted my new game to have everything, and everything should have physics and be ultra realistic, etc. I've always liked cars so I decided that if (or rather, when) the player ever needed to drive a car, I wanted it to be fun and realistic. So I spend years tweaking physics on my car model in the new engine.

This does not make me an expert in car physics as I was also spending a huge amount of time just learning C++ and rebuilding huge chunks of the engine over and over as I learned new things.

I started to become such a petrol head that it made sense to rather make a car game than a whole fps with cars. Would be more achievable too.

The problem is I never thought about the end result and how long it would take. I just continued to work on piece by piece and I spent a good amount of time.

Forward like 7 or 8 years and here we are. I took a break from gamedev when I felt the need to make some useful utilities to help me with my daily life.

But sometime soon I'll get back into it with a proper plan and actually finish it. I have some good ideas of what I want.

For now see below for a compilation video of my game engine over the years. The graphics really didn't change much as I needed the bare minimum assests to mess around with. Although I did spend quite a bit of time with shadows in shaders.

I created the levels and some of the static meshes. Most of the models that move, were created by a friend who loved creating meshes at the time. I still had to texture them for the most part though... (you know who you are) XD

Below is a compilation video of what I worked on over the years. It is a bit too long and boring but I decided to throw almost all my old game footage in so that it is somewhere on the web for reference.