I started developing games from a very young age. As a youngster my two passions were computers and football so, unsurprisingly my very first “games” revolved around football. I made a text based football manager game, where you could choose your formation and watch the match being played. I also did a very basic Sensible Soccer clone but struggled with the physics of the ball. I followed a lot of tutorials from magazines and used BASIC and a program for the Amiga called AMOS. I knew then that game development was something that peaked my interest.
I took a rather long break from programming and game development in my late teens and early twenties, until 2007 when I set up my own training company in Beijing China. As part of the whole process of setting up a business I recaptured my interest in programming and web development. I developed home grown CRM and financial systems for the company later moving into open source software. I also built the company website, intranet and training platform. In my spare time, which there was very little of, I took up game development again with a goal to improve my programming skills.
I can’t remember the early technologies I used OGRE was something I dallied with but it was XNA that really made me start to be more productive. The first real complete game I made was a variation of pong based on the air hockey games you get at the arcades. It was mouse driven and two player. The fun of this was getting two mice working independently on one computer. I also created a top down space shooter with realistic physics and AI ships to fight against. I wanted to have trading but that was beyond my ability at that point. And still being in China, I had very limited access to online resources, no YouTube, no Facebook.
When XNA was abandoned, I moved ship to FlatRedBall which was a great little game engine that allowed me to bring across my skills with C# with minimal fuss. My best game here was a game in a day which I created with the help of my nephews. It was a top down shooter called Future Wars and had you fighting off alien monster zombies. Great fun. I also made a trance bacterial simulation called Color Life that had bacteria moving and bumping into each other and changing color. My main aim with this game was deployment on a mobile device and learning the different inputs and environment and what you could achieve.
Around the same time, I started working on a game called RRRS Roguelike on CodePlex. My aim here was to learn what it was like working on a game as a team. It was C# but the game itself was in the console. I started off with bug fixes and refactoring and made my way to the top eventually becoming the admin of the project.
When I returned to England in 2014, I had access to YouTube and I had been interested in Unity for some time but unable to follow any of the tutorials. Unity became my new playground. It took me a while to shake off my Object Oriented Design mind set and dive into Component Based Design. I’ve made many games on Unity and followed hundreds of tutorials. Now I want to share that knowledge with you!
See Also
My Favorite Games for the ZX Spectrum
Useful links for learning game development with Unity
The best free software for game development
External Links
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_XNA
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