A reintroduction to the community
Good day game developers, game enthusiasts and creatives a like,
My name is Jonathan and I used to be apart of the community years and years ago and after going to the Joburg meetup I felt I needed to do re-introductions.
I am 27 and currently I run the (really really new) YouTube lets play channel Avatronis
Besides that I am a multi-disciplined programmer from the web based Javascript, php, etc... through your platform based C#, C++, Java, etc... and even mobile Android Java and iOS Objective-C
I also do digital art and animation 3D and 2D, but I'm rather the cheapskate using open source tools like Gimp, Blender and Synfig Studio.
I am familiar with the game development tools like XNA, Unity and the Unreal engine.
My ultimate goal in life is to one day create my own games
Anyway can't promise I will be the most active person here, time is always a thing against me, but really interested in poking my head around and seeing what the local community is up to.
Thank you for having me
My name is Jonathan and I used to be apart of the community years and years ago and after going to the Joburg meetup I felt I needed to do re-introductions.
I am 27 and currently I run the (really really new) YouTube lets play channel Avatronis
Besides that I am a multi-disciplined programmer from the web based Javascript, php, etc... through your platform based C#, C++, Java, etc... and even mobile Android Java and iOS Objective-C
I also do digital art and animation 3D and 2D, but I'm rather the cheapskate using open source tools like Gimp, Blender and Synfig Studio.
I am familiar with the game development tools like XNA, Unity and the Unreal engine.
My ultimate goal in life is to one day create my own games
Anyway can't promise I will be the most active person here, time is always a thing against me, but really interested in poking my head around and seeing what the local community is up to.
Thank you for having me
Comments
Ludum Dare (big game jam) is coming up at the end of the month, 29 July, I'll start a thread on it soon. You should totally join if you're interested in making games :) And why else are we all here, right? :)
The best explanation I can give for not having made a game yet is that life keeps happening. I know you can all agree in that making a game is a very involved, time consuming task. Every time I do start up a project and get somewhere technically, something will always pop up, be it work or some other drama. My hope and what I am working towards is getting my life in order so I can have the dedicated time to work on said projects again.
For now all of my focus is on my YouTube channel.
*ahem*
Sorry. I'm going through the exact same thing. Work on a game engine for years and now have barely enough time to do anything. It can get really sad. So good luck :) If you can get back into it, that's good!
There are game jams where you make a game in a day, or a weekend that happen quite regularly (as @Tuism said). There's even a game jam that happens in "zero hours" (in the northern hemisphere). It starts and ends at the same time, when the clocks are set back for daylight savings (so ~1 hour in real time, I think. I don't actually know if DST is consistent between regions that adopt it). Obviously, there's a high chance that the games you make in a short time won't be very good, especially when you start out... but I'm also quite sure that very close to 100% of great artists, composers, athletes and game developers DID NOT make masterpieces on their first try. We don't teach budding composers to write symphonies on their first go; instead, they write 4-bar or 8-bar, single-voice melodies. We don't teach athletes to bench 250kg on their first go; we get them to bench using only the bar itself (or maybe I was just that terrible :D). There's absolutely no shame in making something tiny, and building on that, moving forward from there. (In fact, doing any more than that before you're ready for it, when applied to a field like exercise, is actually setting yourself up for ugly failure and injury.)
I don't mean to presume anything about your life; for all I know one hour, one day, or one weekend every few months is practically impossible to piece together. But if the "ultimate goal" is to be making your own games, does spending time on running a Youtube channel help nudge you toward your goal, or distract you from it? (I could make rationalizations for either case. I just think it's also important to be honest with yourself, if you haven't been, and if you're ready for it.)
Sometimes we do need time to recover from trauma, and there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, if we wait for the perfect conditions before pursuing our dreams... ... ...
(Again, I'm not you, and I don't know your situation. I'm sort of just taking a chance that I'm maybe saying what you needed to hear, and if I'm not, please disregard!)
On that note anyway I thought I would share with you all My "bab-bies" first video game that I made back when I started learning XNA. Honestly it is a piece of crap, I wouldn't even call it a functional Alpha and I wouldn't even show the code since it was a crime against the nature of coding. But when I started I tried creating an Arconoid game.
Since I am going on and on about being a YouTuber... A little too much. I wanted to know your opinions on me play testing video games from the community on my channel?
annnnd end off with a picture of me wearing a sonic the hedgehog head piece:
So...like most games then :)