Since I could hold a controller in my hands, I’ve enjoyed gaming and always wanted to make games.
After graduating university however, I was given two choices:
A) Get a stable job with decent pay working in the world Enterprise Retail Planning (every kid’s dream, right??)
B) Get an unstable job making “Dora the Explorer type games” that I have little passion for.
I went with the stable route.
Fast forward 10 years, my career became more stable and more interesting, working with all sorts of new enterprise software like AWS, Terraform while gaining a really strong backend in object oriented fundamentals, with Java being my language of choice (Step off Python fanboys! I use Python too!)
With Covid hitting, I was given a lot of time to do stay at home and game.
After awhile I beat a huge backlog of single player games, reached “Gold” ranking in League of Legends (yes this was big for me!) and hit “Elite Smash with multiple characters in smash bro (Ness/Dedede main here, you’d throw your controller at me after awhile)
While enjoyable at first, life became like the movie “Groundhog’s day”, where every day felt the exact same.
Wake up at 9:25AM
Log onto work at 9:30 AM
Work till 6:00PM
Game/TV
Sleep
The money I was making no longer contributed to any additional joy in my life because I couldn’t well..do anything with the money. So I decided it was time to actually utilize my programming skills for personal dumb projects!
I made a twitter bot that spammed dog and cat facts against random famous peoples twitter accounts. It eventually got banned f or breaking ToS, but I broke over 50 likes with an automated post so I considered it a win
My 2nd side project was a discord bot, more of the same idea as the twitter bot, but people could get random dog facts, cat facts, jokes, dank memes, magic 8ball readings and Chuck Norris facts on the fly. The fact that people use it to this day makes me happy. You reader, can add this bot to your server if you’d like! https://discord.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=799857180462809108&permissions=2048&scope=bot
While both these projects were fun on their own, they served a greater purpose, to give me the confidence that I could actually make a game.
My aim was to make a 2D mobile game. After doing some research, it seemed the Unity game engine was the right tool for this task.
In order to learn this tool, I first did a tutorial which taught us how to make “Flappy Bird” in 2 hours. This was really cool because in 2 hours I had recreated something that made a guy beyond filthy rich.
Playlist is here for those tutorials if you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWn4i5u2pWY&list=PLX2vGYjWbI0QBJUI5wI3lBTaz85k37dwo&index=11
After gaining some knowledge here, I decided I wanted to make a game in a similar style, addictive where 1 hit can kill you.
Many YouTube tutorials later, I made my first prototype game. It didn’t even have a name, you just controlled a space ship by tapping it, with the goal of dodging the moving rings for 45 seconds.
It was fun to make, but very exploitable and easy to beat. It did however provide me with a lot more knowledge of Unity, enabling me to make my first “Real” game, Deep Ship Alpha — Now available on Google Play (ios version may be released in the future)
I made the game in about 2 months. I believe my knowledge in programming helped me accelerate this process quite a bit.
Am I rich now? Only if you consider $1.34 rich :) Marketing is a real pain unfortunately. However, it was beyond satisfying watching my friends enjoy this game.
I am motivated to keep making more games down the line. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll make it big. It won’t happen though if I stop trying.
