This project has had an interesting journey since 2019, when it began as an experiment.

In terms of creativity, I've always primarily been a musician, but as a result of a lifelong fascination with technology, I often get quite fixated on these little experiments. My boyfriend calls it "tinkering". I tell him I'm off to do some tinkering, and then go into my studio/office and fiddle around with some new piece of software or equipment that I've invariably purchased in some passing notion that I'm going to get really into Gaussian Splatting or something. (Incidentally, when I was in the market for a new phone last year, I had impulsively decided on an iPhone purely based on the fact it had LiDAR scanning abilities and for about 3 months, any time we went anywhere, I would be trailing behind, scanning things. My boyfriend is very patient with me).

All that to say, this particular project was born out of a YouTube rabbit hole I went down in 2019 (another fertile source of inspiration for things to tinker with), and somehow ended up on a multi-part tutorial on coding a 3D character controller in Unity. Game development always fascinated me, even as a kid.

Something I had completely forgotten started to come back to me. My best friend and I (in around 2003) had found this piece of software called "The Games Factory" where we would spend afternoons after school making our own simple games. They were all pretty awful/silly and almost all were rip-offs of stuff we were currently playing. I think we tried to make an Age of Empires clone, but set in our school, involving using a giant God Hand (like in "Black & White") to pick up students and move them around, with Microsoft Paint artwork and recording our own sound effects, which I'm sure were excellent.

There was no coding exactly, it was more like a big spreadsheet called the "Event Editor" where you made connections between things, but the logic was there. I remembered how much I had loved those afternoons.

Early days of my game development career

Back in 2019, and after watching the first couple of videos, it didn't look as hard as I was expecting. This is laughable now, I have been thoroughly disabused of that feeling, making games is impossibly difficult, but at the time I had this reductive idea that games were something that could only be made by incredibly clever people with fancy degrees in computer science who speak in machine-code instructions. They whisper to the computer and the computer obeys, because it knows they are worthy. I think this speaks to a lack of self-confidence more than anything else, but this was how I felt.

And yet, this video was explaining things in ways that I (a non-computer-whisperer) understood. So I dutifully downloaded Unity and followed along. In the end, the result was...fine? I confess I was disappointed at first. Why does it still feel so unfinished? Why doesn't it feel like a game? I cringe at myself now for expecting so much. I think I had the mistaken belief that following one tutorial for an hour or so was going to give me an end result that would rival the most complex and nuanced character controllers/game cameras, which is, of course, insane.

What it gave me, once I got a grip of myself and my unreasonable expectations, was a starting point and a little glimmer of self-confidence. I had actually understood (mostly...) what I had been doing in following the tutorial, and I wanted to keep going. I didn't have a clue what I wanted to make, but I thought it would be fun to keep learning.

A very blurry picture of my first foray into Unity. Masterful level design.

To be continued...