Why Yet Another Game Development Blog? | Week 1 of Game Making

Why make yet another Game Development blog? Among other reasons¹, to document how much (or how little) a single person can achieve while doing gamedev as a hobby. You know how as a beginner, it is often very difficult to tell what sort of scope is achievable in a given time frame? Let me be your test subject. I would say I make for a good test subject. In terms of ability I’m in the lower to medium range among hobbyists:

• I can code, but have no experience working on codebases over a couple thousand lines of code.
• I know how to use blender, but I don’t consider myself experienced or particularily talented when it comes to 3D-modeling.
• I also don’t have a background in 2D art.
• Most of my brain power gets eaten by university and other commitments. As far as gamedev is concerned, I’m not very smart.
• I’m not a particularily motivated or disciplined person. Sometimes, I have trouble brushing my teeth in the morning.

So to sum up, anything I can do, you can probably do too ;).

This isn’t to say that my rate of progress will be perfectly comparable to yours. You might be faster than me, or slower. Most likely, you will work on a different kind of game and have a different life. Still, why don’t you have a look? ^^

Who am I, anyways?

My name is Kerstin (hkerstin), 24 years old, and I’m doing my master’s degree in maths. I’ve been mucking around with various game engines for way too many years now (and have very little to show for it :D). Anyways a couple months ago I made a little game called Good Night, Pen :

I challenged myself to make and finish a game in a single day. It’s nothing to be impressed by, but it was fun to make. In fact, it made me consider doing a 2D game for a solid couple of weeks because I found making a rudimentary frame-by-frame animated character really enjoyable to make. I did switch back to 3D for reasons I will go into in a future blog post.

So what have I been up to this week?

I tracked how many hours I spent on gamedev each day:

As you can see, I have not been active from Wednesday through Saturday (I spent a lot of time on Sunday setting up this blog). The reality is that as a hobby gamedev, life gets in the way. And this week in particular, it has been getting in the way extra hard.
I believe it is important to be transparent about these things. I considered postponing the launch of this blog by another week, but I chose not to.

Originally, my plan for this week was to create a 3D model of a chair I own. I didn’t get very far :(.

Even though I didn’t finish it yet, working on it has helped me identify a couple of areas I need to improve in as a 3D artist.

1. Proportions. I really struggle with this. One thing that has helped a little is to make a “sketch object”, i.e. a really rough version of the mesh that helps me define some “anchor points” in space. Maybe making orthogonals for myself could work as well, but I can’t draw.

   

2. Interpretation. What I mean is that for this object, I mostly just tried to copy it as-is from real life, being a bit lazy on detail. Which is fine for a practise mesh. Eventually, I will need to learn to adapt and combine objects into meshes that are sensible in a game.
3. Speed. Partly I was slow because finding the correct proportions was slow. This will get better with practise.
   However, I also think that my current workflow is not very efficient. I think I will look into procedural modeling, more on this in the future.

Just for reference, here are two 3D models I made in the past. These are all the proper finished models that I ever made. So as you can see, I am very much a beginner when it comes to 3D art.

Future Plans

I will be updating this blog every week on Sunday². Inevitably, some weeks, life will get in the way. Still, I’ll post an update saying “I didn’t do much this week, sorrrry”.

Next week, I will start looking into procedural modeling. I’ll explain what I mean by that next Sunday.
My long-term goal for now is to hone my skills as a 3D artist and build up an efficient work-flow. Maybe I’ll build some kind of “demos” along the way.
Eventually, I will want to team up with some other people (like a gameplay programmer or a sound designer) to make a game together.