Making Games
By John Beers on .
The first computer I ever got to use was a Texas Intruments TI-99. It was around 1984, which puts me somewhere close to 8 years old. My elementary school had that one computer for the entire building. I got to do some stuff with turtle graphics but not much else. Even though my exposure was limited, it planted a seed of what was possible.
I'm a creative person. I hacked together games with balloons and string stretched across the room to play "volleyball" with my sisters. I made up my own board games, sometimes with no pieces and just kept everything was in my head. Art and music were always in the picture, too. A lot of that came together for the first time when I was 11.
Christmas 1987 was the year I received a glorious gift: the Tandy Color Computer 2. I played the games my parents bought me, of course. I loved Dungeons of Daggorath and would spend hours making up fictional teams and leagues for Color Baseball, tracking all the stats and records. Where things gelled though was getting that initial taste of coding.
Between the included documentation and the source code I saw in issues of 3-2-1 Contact magazine, I taught myself BASIC. I made things like a "diary" program, which saved text data to a cassette tape, and I made my first games. I don't profess to be Lord British. I wasn't making Akalabeth, but even the simplest text-based games brought me joy. There was just something about that loop of writing the code and then being able to move those colored stick figures across the screen with a joystick.
I took all the coding classed that were offered in school, from BASIC in 8th grade to two years of Pascal in high school. For some reason, I had the asinine idea that doing something you enjoy for a job would take the fun out of it. I wasn't entirely wrong but rather than pursuing a computer science path, I opted to do...nothing and instead worked at jobs I didn't like for the majority of my life. That's a story for a different post though.
Despite not doing anything technical for gainful employment, I still did some things on the side, mostly HTML/CSS and Python. In the past couple years, I started to hear about this game engine called Godot, especially with different game engines changing licenses and fees. I love Linux and open-source so this was right up my alley.
I finally got around to learning Godot about 12 months ago. THIS was what I've been missing in my life. Game engines weren't a thing when I was a kid and animating stick figures was all I could muster at the time. I started out building several small games from a Udemy course (one of which I expanded and released), but I've also created an original game called Wightwatch Keep. It's open-source but also available on Itch.io.
Realistically speaking, I'm almost 50 and have no delusions of breaking into game dev at this point in my life. Sure, I could make an indie hit, but it's probably not going to happen. What can happen, however, is finding the joy in building something, getting to play in a world of my creation, and sharing it with others. I've tapped into that fountain of youth where problem-solving is play and the fruit of those efforts is moving pixels across the screen with a gamepad.