Hey everyone. My name is Michael, welcome to my devblog where I will be writing about my game development experience over the past 5 years. At the time of writing this I am taking a break from gamedev to focus on other things, one of which is this blog.
Background
My friends and I formed an indie game studio called Overlook Studios during our third year of university and began working on 2D games in Unity. With a seemingly endless supply of motivation and creativity, we were driven by passion and the desire to learn how to make games.
Over the years, we worked on various projects ranging from an atmospheric survival horror game to a rhythm-based beat-em-up roguelike.
The team:
- Michael Bitzos - Lead programmer
- Adam Mawby - Artist
- Ben Petkovsek - Designer/Programmer
- Cole Bondarewski - Music/SFX
Now you might be asking:
"What games did you release?"
And the answer is:
None.
Even though our projects weren't finished, there is still a thousand hours of hard work, a hundred thousand lines of code, and a large repository of knowledge that can be learned from.
Purpose
My goal is to share my experiences as the lead programmer for my team as well as how I incorporated my education and professional experience as a software engineer into designing the systems for the various core gameplay frameworks, features, and mechanics needed for our projects.
This blog is for anyone with a decent understanding of programming who is struggling to make games because of the challenges they face writing clean, maintainable, and scalable code. There will be an overarching focus on the technical skills of making 2D games in the Unity engine.
With any luck, you can learn from some of the lessons I've learned so that your technical abilities are not the reason you can't complete your dream game.
Conclusion
If you continue to read this blog, thank you for following me, hopefully reading about my challenges will help you overcome yours.