Hello and welcome. If you’ve made it this far, thank you for visiting my site. What I’m working on here is a way to document my journey into amateur game development so that it might provide an overview to others who would also like to develop games casually and will hope fully become a useful guide and resource to help you also take your first steps. My aim is to update each week with my progress since the last post as well as build a repository of useful links and resources that others find useful. Along the way I may even delve into some of my own personal history with games, some of my favourite games, and invite you to send in your memories of your favourite games to contribute too. Right then, let’s begin!
My Reasoning
I’ve always had a love of games from an early child. Be that the popular board games such as Monopoly and The Game of Life when I was growing up, to my first computer games and beyond. I always had a dream to become a games developer and make my own games, so much so that I studied Software Development in university and eventually became a developer, though focused more on business apps than games.
Through the twists and turns of life my career has led me to many successful roles, but when my son was born a few years ago I knew I wanted something with a little more flexibility and remote working, so that I could be there for the key moments in my sons life and be the hands on parents that I wanted to be. Thankfully, I got lucky and now work as a project manager for an awesome company that really understand the importance of family, flexibility and the pros to both employee and employer of remote working.
Now, as my son gets a little older and settles into a routine, we’re finding that we’re getting some time back in our lives for the things we loved to do in our spare time. Whilst I’ve always managed to carve out some time for a little gaming in some way, shape, or form whilst my son has been growing up, now he’s getting to an age that he can start to join in the games too, and that gives us the opportunity to go on a journey together starting with revisiting some the classics from when I was a child.
Having that time in the evenings and seeing my son love the games I used to play so much it’s inspired me to get into some amateur game development and see if I could produce something that he would love just as much.
First Steps
Getting into Games Development is no easy feat. I come from a Software Development background and even I found it a little confusing at first. From research it sounds as though the first step, however, is to find yourself a game engine to learn. Whilst there’s lots of them out there to consider, for me there were two that caught my eye, Unreal Engine and Unity. There are some other great engines out there to consider such as Godot, GameMaker Studio, and RPG Maker, but for me Unreal Engine and Unity seemed like the one’s with the biggest communities behind them, which for anyone starting out down this path is going to be a big help. If you’d like to check out a list of other game engines and see which one you fancy, I’d recommend checking out this article from GameDesigning.
The 25 Best Video Game Engines
Whilst both Unreal Engine and Unity both have excellent resources for taking your first steps into their respective engines, I really like how Unity have laid out their tutorials in individual pathways which provide a really good roadmap for learning not just the essentials, but more beyond. Therefore, I’ve decided that Unity Engine is going to be my engine of choice for starting out. To find out more about Unity and it’s pathways you can visit them here. Unity Learn
Ok, so now that I’ve decided which engine I’m going to develop against it’s time to get stuck in, install and get developing my first games. Here goes nothing!
Catch you next time,
Dan
Dan Does Games 