Starting from scratch

17 June 2021

I’ve written software since 17 years old, not counting odd programming-esque things growing up like altering programs on a graphing calculator or little drag and drop logic builders.

Despite being around tech for 10 years, I haven’t explored game development unless you count a handful of frustrating days looking at Unity. I think I’ve tried to build something in Unity a dozen separate times. It never clicked.

Surprise. Things still have not changed for me with the big engines.

This month I tried diving in again. The usual suspects have popped up. Unity, Godot, and a handful of other open source and non open source systems to build games. Again, these bigger engines and libraries did not even begin to click after a few days of experimenting.

Writing software can have a special kind of way to make us feel like idiots (and then we desperately try to hide those feelings from our coworkers) but game development for me has gone above and beyond with making me feel like an idiot. I do understand game dev has its own universe of specialized technologies and techniques, but I expect that to be capable of wrapping my head around coding a simple map with a movable character.

I’m coming from a web dev background. I’ve built web sites and applications in one form or another since I started programming (with WordPress back in 2011 in all its glory). I’ve moved through a variety of frameworks, languages, and toolsets since but the last 5 to 6 years have been focused on Python.

So naturally I’ve also run across pygame. Using pygame throughout the last week has been an entirely different experience. The framework is more explicit and maybe more cumbersome compared to other tools of course, but I’m excited to use it to learn. Writing some of the logic for display rendering, handling sprites, simple physics, etc. clears up the fog in my head. I’m going to use it to hopefully build multiple small projects or prototypes. As I get further into the game dev world, maybe even get something out to steam or itch.io.

So let’s see how this goes. Wish me luck.