My game development journey
Hi. I’m Kevin, and here’s my story.
Over the years, there have been many projects in the works, but none of them are finished yet. That’s about to change!
This year I’ve made a promise to myself, that I will see a game development project through to the end.
Do you want to be notified about the development, or when a game is ready?
You can even opt-in to be offered free betas and demos 🙂
Galactic Gundown
My first try at Game Development back in 2016. It’s a VR game, originally developed for the Samsung Gear VR. It actually got pretty far – but after a burnout, too much had changed with Unity and the Oculus SDK, and I got stuck trying to upgrade the project to the new versions.
ElectriCar™
Years later, following a tutorial about making mobile games, I started to build a casual racing game for mobile.
I ended up shelfing it, because I found level designing tedious – and I couldn’t motivate myself properly. Perhaps due to the fact that I appreciate neihter mobile games, nor racing games…
I can’t guarantee however, that I’m not some day gonna create those levels and publish it on Play Store.
DiggR
During that same course, I dug out an old note with a game idea: A digging game, digging for coal, oil, gems and such. Still a mobile game, but more a kind of 2D runner game.
I had some issues with getting the world to be ‘infinite’ while still being serializable (I needed to unload parts of the level, but reload later, should the player dig in circles).
Aquarium Simulator​
Brainstorming one day, together with my daughter, we figured that simulation games were our favourites, and out of all the ideas from the brainstorm, Aquarium Simulator seemed the easiest.
As the development progressed, the simulation got increasingly advanced however. It turns out, that there’s actually quite a lot going in in a fish tank – and being a biologist by education, I went off on a tangent and created algorithms for calculating realistic heat-exchanges, oxygen transmissions over surface areas, age dependent growth factors and mass dependent expressions of metabolic rates.
As was readily apparent, once again I had scoped too big.
I would like to work on this again later, but for now it sits on the shelf in its current half-finished prototype state, which you can try here online.
RoboCrusoe
Actually an old idea for a clicker-game, back from early 2000s. Back then I had no idea how to make games of any sort however.
While cleaning out my dropbox, I stumbled upon the script. I found it quite amusing, so that night I couldn’t stop thinking about how I would implement it. And as I was presently learning JavaScript for work, I ended up implementing it in JS.
Using a game engine might have been better. Structuring all the data in JS is not my finest work – but it does the job.
I’ll probably get around to expanding it some day.
For now however, there’s a public alpha build that you can play if you have ten minutes to spare – and want to click some buttons while reading a quirky story.
SimGarden
The newest game on the block, and the one I’m actually going to finish this year, in 2023.
It is the right scope, that I can finish it, and the right genre that I can stay motivated all year.
It’ll be a simple PC game about a guy with a garden. I imagine it will be available on Steam.