Learning to Game Dev #1

Around September of 2023, my friends shared with me the first few hours of the game they’d been working on… and honestly, wow. I had no idea they’d been working on a game, and they started sharing their journey in my DMs.

So you can thank (or blame) RnR Interactive.

After about a month of this, I started having ideas… an ADHD person’s worst nightmare. I did what any seasoned person with ADHD does—procrastinated until my idea turned into the urge to talk about it.

I started telling my friends about this idea for a story that (let’s be honest sucked), but after roping in my friend and partner’s coworker, we are now making a visual novel game. (And also started a hobbyist game dev studio - ideationforge.com).

And since I’ve started working on this game, I am cursed with new ideas all the time, with simply not enough time (or money) to do them all.

When I first started learning Ren’Py with no prior coding skills outside of Myspace HTML and I came across my first problem my immediate reaction was determined rage.

In case you’re curious the problem was: I wanted the output from a player’s response to return an item from a list randomly.

I must have spent two hours on it before caving and asking my friend, who spent another two hours with me, successfully solving it. And that was the first time I felt the high of programming. Don’t worry, I quickly realized it was short-lived and that I’d never want to do it for my full-time job.

Now I have a spreadsheet with eight game ideas, and I’m doing my first game jam next month. It will certainly be interesting—I’m traveling the last two days of the jam, so I only have eight days instead of ten. That’ll be fun.