I almost forgot about this thing!

Well, here I am again.

I had almost forgotten about this thing! hah.

I guess updates first. It's been quite some times since I've written anything here. The most pressing update, and the reason I remembered I even had this blog, is that I'm participating in something called 1GAM. Over at http://www.onegameamonth.com/ It's a pretty interesting little site that challenges people to make 1 game a month for a whole year.

I actually decided to do this long before I found out about the site, and the community. I made it through my whole January project before discovering this community.

Anyways, to go along with my whole "year of game dev" I decided that I should be documenting a lot of what's going on this year. It's pretty important for me to be able to identify my struggles, pitfalls, successes, and all of that stuff. Which, of course, led me to the idea of starting a blog when I suddenly remembered that I already had one!

SO! Let's talk about some general observations.

First, how this started up. I found the gamemaker software free on steam and decided "what the hell". The original idea here was to try and keep my barrier for entry as low as humanly possible. I wanted to try and avoid code if at all possible, and to be able to focus purely on the design and mechanical aspects of the game.

That didn't work.

At all.

I've come to accept that I need to know some coding if I'm going to work in the digital realm. There's really no escaping that. It's good, and it's bad, but it's the truth. One one hand learning how code works, and programming logic, and all of that is of major value. As computers and internet make our world smaller, knowing how to function within software is increasingly valuable.

I've already learned *SO* much, it's really kind of surprising. To be quite honest, I have no clue how translatable the game maker language (GML) is to another, more advanced, language but I figure any experience can't really hurt me. I've always been able to decipher code and reverse-engineer it to figure out what's going on, but never before have I really had to think long and hard about generating code.

I find that most of the logic and math is actually fairly easy for me, it's finding the functions and formatting that is a huge pain in the ass. Of course, I'm typing this from a position of "I've only attempting extremely simple development" so I could (and likely will) end up eating those words in time.

While coding can be troublesome, where I'm struggling the most is with Art.

I am not an artist. I have very little skill with art, or patience with it. I realize that art is absolutely a learned skill. Having gone to art and design school and being forced to "do art" a lot, I know that the more you do it, the better you get at it. But I don't enjoy it.

I love mechanics, systems, how things work together, I love to sit down and figure out how things work. I'm often highly inspired by art and art itself can cause me to flood with ideas on how I can factor that into systems or what neat things I could do with it. But generating art is... simply not my bag. baby.

Anyways, I'm going to be trying to update this more often now that I legitimately have something to talk about. I'll write in a bit on my January game and do a post-mortem of sorts, then later I'll do some writing on the February game and what a disaster it's been so far! :D