The only reasonable way to start off properly in game development is to make your first few games small, tight, polished, and punchy.

I have no interest whatsoever in making those kind of games. I think part of my fascination with computer games will forever be based on what it was like to navigate (with chubby uncoordinated child hands) to the edge of the map in LEGO Creator: Harry Potter or other early 3D games, and look out past the invisible walls. At that age I assumed that the world had been merely described in (or to?) the game code by the developers, that this description was all-encompassing, and that it continued on forevermore beyond the walls, with the play boundaries only put in place to prevent me from getting lost out there and not being able to find the prescribed objectives.

Since the game took place in a valley, for example, the game would know valleys are surrounded by mountains (which -- adding to my belief -- were right there, in the skybox!), and not only would those peaks be out there for me to find - if I could just find the gap in the invisible wall I knew must have been left somewhere by accident or design -- but so too would their far-side slopes, and the river running down them out to the sea, and the harbor nestled by that river's mouth, and whatever might lay past that etc. etc. etc.

If a game let me move a single character -- a man of flesh, a man of LEGO, a truck or a horse or a plane -- around in a world, and if the camera angle was low enough to let me see the horizon, than that man or truck or horse would spend the majority of its time always seeking that horizon, trying every route that I could find to get a little closer to the wall, (unknowingly) abusing collision imprecision and movement bugs (things I perceived as secret abilities) to find a hidden-away place I hadn't tried, always seeking to find the little door left in the cordon just for me.

When I got a little older and started playing Blockland -- and especially when I got a little older than that and started playing around in its level editor -- my views were both surprisingly confirmed and very strongly dashed.

The Torque Game Engine that Blockland ran on did, in fact, extend the game world on forever and ever and ever past what it defined as "the play area" -- as far as I'm aware, it extended it as long as your floating-point processor and RAM could keep up -- and I was transfixed by this fact, spending far too long holding down the jetpack button of Blockland, the W key of the editor camera, or (later) the sprint key of Age of Time to chase this ever-distant horizon.

But the original rush of this freedom wore off eventually. The way Torque extended the world was to simply copy the terrain in the "real" world -- the part defined as the play area -- and paste it in an endless grid leading off from that area. That was it. Some maps used these extra copies quite cleverly to squeeze as much out of the limited toolset as they c

A Year Of Rest, 2021

Manage the bare essentials of quasi-life as you attempt to therapeutically waste a year in your apartment.

Based extremely roughly on My Year of Rest & Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, and created in 3 days for Ludum Dare Jam 49. Small and tight (though neither polished nor punchy) and not very good.

Boat Game, TBD

A solo exploration of the Garry's Mod map gm_deepbluesea drew me into the aesthetic of a mid-century island resort town perpetually trapped in a late-autumn off season, made up of new concrete, mouldering wood, deserted restaurants, and people waiting for a tourist season that will never arrive.

I got to work repurposing some basic code from a earlier project of mine, and within a short period of time had an island surrounded by crashing waves and covered by far-too-large buildings. Since then, I've worked in short spurts on the game; big marquee features since then include seaborne wildlife, fishing poles, NPCs capable of conversation and slacking off at work, more interesting buildings, more dynamic waves, boats large and small and procedural, and rent-seeking economics you the player are inevitably forced to deal with.

It's not accurate to say that there's a 50-50 shot of this game ever seeing the light of day; it's more accurate to say that I flucuate between "I could get a pre-alpha playable with a week's focused effort" and "this is a tech demo that will never nor should ever be seen by eyes other than mine", feeling one way 50% of the time and the other the other 50%. At this point, the game is probably in the top 49th precentile or so of slop that gets poured on the "early access" section of your favorite video game e-commerce platform.

You will be able to read more about my general idea for the game on the dedicated sub-page for it when it gets created.

Bike Game, TBD

A rough idea for a game based on motorcycle couriers. Envision something like Road Rash but set in an interconnected city-countryside map, with missions consisting of navigating this map as fast as possible from a pickup point to a drop-off point. The high-risk nature of the job makes a system of permadeath a natural fit, while the easily-quantified modification of motorcycles makes persistent upgrades and customization equally easy to dovetail.

The initial setting concept lifts the aesthetics of early-Thatcherite London and egregiously appropriates them for a game touching on the gig economy. A metagame time-pressure mechanism based on the progressive repeal of educational opportunities provides a nice ending point for the game and a speculative title: Courier '80-'84.

The idea's nice and all but the game's been stalled for quite a while at the first (most critical) hurdle; creating satisfying motorcycle controls with the single analog input (the mouse) available to a computer is a tough one. The current state is a grey box with which you can speed up, slow down, lean around corners, and visually (but not physically) slide the rear wheel; the box's physics and powerplant performance correspond suspiciously well to those of a 1980 Suzuki GS450.