Hello World!

My earliest gaming memory is sitting on my dad’s lap at four or five, firing the shotgun in DOOM while he handled the movement. I had no idea what I was doing, and I’m pretty sure the game was way too intense for a toddler. Even so, I remember staring at the screen and being completely fascinated, caught up in this strange new world I didn’t fully understand but couldn’t look away from.

By the time I was nine or ten, my dad asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. Without much thought, I told him I wanted to make computer games. Years later, when it came time to pick a university course, I remembered that conversation, shrugged, and applied to study Computer Science with a games specialization at the University of Brighton.

I graduated with a 2:1, a £2k overdraft, £25k in student loans, and a strong desire to get drunk and make music with my friends. I was passionate about coding, but I wasn’t ready to make a conventional office job the center of my life. My first job was as a junior web developer at a tiny startup in Brighton, UK. That was thirteen years ago. Today, I work in the same industry as a Software Architect.

I’m sad to say I’ve barely written a line of C++ since uni. Part of that stems from fear. I’ve always had a genuine desire to create for myself and for others, but I’ve also feared failure, and oddly enough, success. I suspect this isn’t unusual, it seems like a very Millennial thing.

Over the years, my skills as a programmer have developed more than I ever imagined they would. Outside of work, I’ve dabbled in a bunch of creative pursuits: music production, martial arts, poker, cooking, songwriting. And now I finally feel confident enough in both my problem-solving and creative abilities to take the plunge and chase that original dream: building virtual worlds.

This devlog is where that journey begins. My long-term goal is ambitious but clear: to write and release my own indie game. In the short term, I’ll study the pioneers, sharpen my C++, and dive deep into programming concepts, game engines, design principles, and yes, the maths I probably should have paid more attention to at uni!

I’ll document everything along the way: experiments and toy projects, programming concepts as I learn them, design decisions and whether they worked, tools and resources that actually help, and inevitably, the mistakes and dead ends, probably a lot of those.

You could say this is my “Hello World” moment for game development.

Let’s see where it takes me.