When I was a teenager me and some friends were obsessed with Sonic. We would play Sonic games in the woods & in the playground a school, we were not cool. We even designed levels and came up with new characters for games we hoped we might one day make.

Skip forward some 30 years and I find myself with time and some skills in programming, so I’m going to have a stab at game development. I won’t be making Sonic games, but I’m going to learn what I can. I’ve been working through some tutorials and getting started with the basics. It’s not like anything I’ve done before and I’m excited to write about what I learn along the way. I hope as my kids grow, it will be fun to make games with them. I have no illusions of ever making any money from this hobby. It’s purely a way to learn something new and have some fun along the way.

I’m landed on using Godot as my tool of choice. It’s open source and runs on my computer well enough. I’ll be starting simply with 2D games and seeing what I can build. I may also get to look at making some of the artwork in time, but for now, there are plenty of free resources out there to get started with.

So funny mistakes have been made already, shooting gigantic fireballs that go nowhere, mobs chasing me way too fast. I’ve also overcome some challenges, things that I thought would be really difficult, like preventing mobs spawning in a particular location so they don’t get stuck in the terrain.

fireballs gone wrong
fireballs gone wrong

I’ll be adding what I’ve made to this repo, mistakes and all. I’ve done the basics added a player, some mobs that respawn and chase you. Currently working on level generation, which has mostly been copied/pasted from a tutorial. The mobs no longer chase me around the map, but they are at least spawning now.

It’s been a big learning curve for sure. I expect I’ll share some of what I learn along the way here. If anything I make actually turns into a full game, I’ll be pretty surprised. It’s really early days yet, but I do have a bunch of ideas about what sort of game I would make. I just need to figure out the basics first.