Happy Halloween

Hi there y’all! It’s October, a great time to indulge in horror and spooky things. I’m doing something pretty scary myself, and that’s trying to use this blog more!

What this blog is for

Originally this blog was intended to be a portfolio to help me get a job working in tech, but time and time again I get rejected because “games aren’t real experience.” So if this blog isn’t doing anything helpful for my job prospects, I might as well focus it in more on my interests than anything else!

Game Post-Mortums

While I’m not a huge fan of the naming, I do like writing up articles talking about the games I’ve made, why I made them and any challenges I faced while doing so. Additionally I like to talk about any interesting tech problems I had to solve as well. I’ve definitely lapsed in writing those, so I do have a backlog to work through!

Tutorials and Informational Guides

If you have already been following my blog, you probably saw my last article, which was definitely in the “Informational Guide” category. I really enjoy sharing information in a way that people can more easily read. Additionally, I want to serve as a way for people to get practice with parts of game development and specifically Godot that they may not have before.

I’ve definitely heard different opinions on shelving my YouTube channel and writing more. But what’s most important to me is that I actually have the time to put things out. If I force myself to do YouTube, I don’t end up posting anything for months because of the time investment. Whereas with this blog, I’m literally taking the first step of making a YouTube video (writing the script), and posting that directly, with some formatting.

Games Discussions/Reviews

Another thing that I really enjoy that I haven’t done yet is discussing existing games. I usually jot down notes about different game elements as I play a game and then I refer to those notes when I want to implement a similar result. It’s really helpful for those squishy design things like, “I want the player to feel anxious.” It’s not really a difficult problem to solve, but doing so in a way that also doesn’t hurt the overall enjoyment and gameplay mechanics can be incredibly difficult.

I’m not sure I would be so narcissitic to call myself a games reviewer. But perhaps what I would like to do is rather similar. More so than just pumping out opinions as fast as possible, I like to dig deep. For example, I’ve been trying to beat The Forest pretty much since it came out (arguably starting well before I should have given my age and the content). I want to do this with more games. I’ve already worked on picking apart notes for Resident Evil 7. The only component missing is my hard-mode replay, which got incredibly difficult for me.

Closing

I have strong aspirations. If you’ve followed me for any length of time you might be skeptical of whether I can actually accomplish this. I think the best I can say is that I want to do this. My most common struggle is against the tension between doing what I love, and having an income. So often the two seem to be mutually exclusive. I may start putting a “support me” badge on my posts in hope that people will want to throw me a dollar or two for the information I write. Though without comments implemented on this blog there isn’t a lot of back and forth.

I suppose if you want to contact me, I have a mastodon account and an email account.