Hey there everyone. So, I thought I would be writing a little bit about how I got to here, my adventures in game development and what's been going on lately a little bit. Enjoy the read!

Around 4-5 years ago, I wanted to experience with the thought of making video games. Maybe one person alone can manage to make masterpieces of gaming's history? And so, I searched for a simple and straightforward engine I could play around with. This is when I found out about Scratch, which is probably the best method to get someone into game dev, in my opinion. I have been practicing a lot, and by now I know how mostly all of the things work.

In between Scratch projects, I found out about more of these smaller engines, like Construct 2 and GameMaker, but I couldn't grab my hands around them so well, and so I stayed where I was for quite a while.

At the time of 8th grade (last year of primary school here), I wanted to move up and try something bigger and better. I went to find myself a 3D engine for the first time. It would have been a big jump, but I knew I could manage it somehow. I found out about 3DRad in a "TOP 5 Free Game Maker Softwares" video, I'm not sure what it was exactly called, but something like this. But yeah, I jumped into it, and, well...It wasn't the greatest at first. I really enjoyed it, but It felt primitive and needed immediate help from somewhere. I found out this was all but really old software, and so finding help would be pretty hard.

This was around the time I found out about the forums. It was quite a cozy place. I went on making many many prototype games, without really finishing any of them. I still used Scratch, but now I finished some of them and made them standalone.

It was time for middle school, and the first year (9th grade, the first year of middle school) really opened up my eyes: programming. We left off with C#, then on the second half-year we jumped to Java, which I didn't like at first, I still don't really cope with it, but it's fine by now, somewhat. Around this time, I felt like I couldn't get any better in 3DRad, so I made my last jump so far. I had 3 game engines of choice I would continue to work on: Unity, Unreal or CryEngine. All of them were quite a mess at the start, but the one I could understand the most was of course Unity (well, let's say understand for now). And so I started my adventure once again with a new engine, more than 1.5 years ago from now.

There were several projects that I think were milestones in my game dev journey in Unity. For Instance:

- HeavyTime, my very first try at FPS, a mixture of SuperHot and arcade-style games. (2018 October 13th - 2019 April 12th) [Discontinued]

- TorqueBall, the first networking game that I tried to make. I haven't heard of network synchronization at the time, and so it was quite the challenge to manage. (2018 July 3rd - 2018 July 10th) [Unfinished]

- Strike of Order, a Doom/Wolfenstein inspired maze shooter, where the goal was to kill zombies and collect keys in order to escape, with a strict time limit. (2018 December 26th - 2019 January 1st) [Unfinished]

- FFArena, the second take on multiplayer, where the goal was to make a simple-to-connect multiplayer Quake-based FPS. (2019 January 13th - 2019 March 29th) [Discontinued]

- Project Convulsion, a modern take on classic storytelling, with a mixture of Sci-Fi and FPS, possibly my biggest project yet, and probably the most unhonoured one too. (2019 April 26th - ) [WIP]

- Strike of Order: Ultimate Bloodshed, a reimagination of the original, Ultimate Bloodshed includes features ported over from Project Convulsion, continuing the spirit of randomly generated levels with storytelling and atmosphere. Originally a remake of HeavyTime, then an open-world survival game. (2019 September 29th ~ 2019 November 20th - ) [WIP]

These games were probably the most important ones. I feel good about most of these games, sure, could have done better, but as a fellow game developer reading this, I'm sure you understand how things can go sometimes.

In the last couple of weeks, I stopped with Project Convulsion a bit to focus on Ultimate Bloodshed a little bit, then after time, I will work on both in tandem.

I thought I would write this down into a post because the last couple of weeks have turned very very bad for me. I have been feeling quite a bit depressed, and also got insta-rejected by a girl I wanted to ask out, so yeah. In short, things aren't looking so great. I have been feeling really shit, and I just couldn't bear it anymore, some of you probably know the feeling of crying yourself to sleep, and so I had to put all this pressure off me at least for a little bit, this meant putting Project Convulsion on hold for some time, and thinking about myself for a little bit. It would be very appreciated to talk about anything you guys want to, I would be more than welcome in these dark times I'm living right now because I have been sort of locking myself away from everything. Thanks.

I made a Discord server a while ago, where I continue to share news about my journey here: https://discord.gg/5U4tC8n

Yup women.. the root of all evil , cant live with them or without them... we're all doomed...

Well, it looks like f*ck me once again. Try to post something nice and get ignored again. Thank you @tinsoldier for answering, at least you did. Well then, just do ignore me, depression is a nice addition to life anyways.

Hey Doomer022 . Life happens man. you just got to get up everytime you fall. and trust me we all fall and get up countless times. Dont lock yourself in your room all day. go out and take a walk or do something to distract you. find something other than game dev to pass the time. you sound pretty young, so dont worry, lots of oppurtunities in the future!! since you are still young , that means you have undiscovered talents you dont know of. So try different things , not just one thing!!

My own adventures in development..

So i mention on the forum I had created a project version of the 3drad airplane auto balance project to allow mouse driving..

So i once again switched temporarily to a new project and will involve flying and racing.. that's all i'll say right now.

So i used an old project to develop the key input routines to mimic the way 3drad does when driving the buggy & pcar's.. that being the key press is applied smoothly .. So i recreated this in script in the airplane project.. spent a long time getting it to work exactly the way i wanted.

Works really nicely, then move the script into my new project... OH WAIT  like running into a brick wall.. I realize AFTER that this new version of the script wont work in the new project for the intended process.

Turns out the brick wall was really a stiff pillow, my new script will & does work in the new project, it just needed a few tweaks and mod's and all's well again...

Also ran into yet another 3drad ( lets call it a bug, but really i caused it ), not really anything new, just happening in a way i don't think i've seen before.. it goes like this...

While scripting my key input routines mentioned above, i crashed 3drad hard 3 times in a row.... so i commented out the offending code , saved the project reloaded it and ran it, and 3drad crashed yet again.. WTF I'm 100% sure the offending code was the issue and cant cause this crash now.. so why was 3drad crashing.. makes no sense to me..

So i instead decide to close the 3drad app and open again and run my offending project ...

Ohh looky there, the same crashing project just minutes ago now runs and is not crashing anymore...

Turns out that this 3drad "bug" was internal to 3drad, caused by my script, but fixing my script by commenting out the script that caused the crash didn't fix the crash.. 3drad had become corrupted internally and the only fix was to close & reopen 3drad...

I've always considered this to be a good practices process, just to be sure 3drad is started as clean as possible when problems arise, ( just reloaded your project fixed or not) isn't good enough to be sure it's fixed. if you run into crash's, you first need to find and fix the offending problem, then save & restart 3drad to be sure your project has been fixed or at least is not crashing anymore. Then you can go back and fix your problem... but remember, if a crash happens, restarting 3drad should always happen before a test run to be sure all's well up to that point.