Experimentation

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything about game development. I often think about writing something new I’ve learned or an idea I had along the way - but never do.

I do however think there is value in writing - even if I’m writing into the void. Writing thoughts down is a good way of solidifying thoughts. You can be retrospective and even learn something new along the way. I’m going to try to post more regularly - even if the only goal is to see my progress over time in my constant game experimentation.

Experimentation is basically where I’ve been the past year. I’ve had plenty of ideas come and go, have created and thrown away dozens of prototypes, and spent way more on the Unity and Unreal marketplaces than I should have in the name of experimentation.

With that said though, I’ve come to really enjoy the process - and most importantly one learnt tons along the way. I often get obsessed with one particular topic in game development, and spend weeks building or hacking through it. Procedural generation is a great example of this. I spent months building various procgen systems in both Unreal and Unity - but only recently decided that for my main project- procgen at least in the terrain sense may not be the best thing.

But you can only learn this though discovery. You’ll never know what is right or wrong for your game without trying it. My recent obsession has been different AI concepts for NPCs in games, and at least in this realm - I feel very strongly that my prototypes will in fact be very relevant to my project.

I suppose that’s the point of this post - try many things - keep on grinding - and over a longer period of time you’ll start to notice improvements both in your own skillset, but in how your projects come together as well.