Hello!
Just thought I would put an introductory blog up about what you have stumbled across, who I am, and what to expect while you are here; you know, before I launch into a series of rambling post about rocks, game design, and/or history. So, instead I am going to ramble egotistically a bit, about myself! Well, just for a moment, and if you are only interested in what I'll be writing about, the two sections of this blog are clearly labeled, just hop down to the Content section (Though be warned, you'll be coming in medias res).
History
My name is Eric.
AKA: Ash87, Ash1987, SergeantAsh87.
I am (At time of writing) a 27 year old geologist. My hobbies, to this point have included hiking, camping, rock collecting, exploring, reading, building, writing, and gaming; but, the reason I am here, is that I have decided to try to design games in my free time.
I started designing games 2 weeks ago for a couple different reasons. The first reason, was that I'd always wanted to try to design my own games. I've always been somebody who followed game development, almost more than I did the actual games themselves. The personalities, the skill, the problems, and the results of game design are often a complex narrative all their own, something that can be more intriguing to learn, than the storyline of the product. The second reason is much less noble, I had a Caesar moment. History Lesson: When Julius Caesar turned 32 he had a bit of an existential crisis. He was already an up and coming member of the roman senate, but his ambitions were... well Roman, in scale. He said to himself: "By this point in his life, Alexander the Great had conquered his first empire." So, he set off to Gaul after raising an army, and proceeded to make a name for himself by killing thousands of proto-frenchmen. For me, this same kind of moment happened to me, when I was wiki-hopping one day. I came across Zoe Quinn's page on wikipedia and noticed that she and I shared the same birth year. So, in the same 27 years it took me to get where I was... She had made a video game and managed to spark off a colossal controversy, that garnered her enough notoriety (Positive or negative notoriety, I'll leave that decision up to you the reader) that she got to write on the Cracked.com! This, obviously, could not be tolerated, so... time to make some vidja games. I figured that would be easier than starting a controversy.
So, there was one problem though... I didn't know how to actually design games. I mean, I'm a generalist by nature, so I knew how to make pixel art, design levels, code on a basic level... But, I didn't know how to tie it all together. So I started doing a ton of research, got myself GameMaker and Unity, and got to work. In doing so I decided (Mostly imitating real life game devs) that I would keep a journal of what I was working on, a dev journal. I've always enjoyed writing, and this was a new, fun, and entertaining thing that I was trying, so I figured I would always have something to write about. Writing out my progress in the game I was working on, had an unexpected side effect though, it helped me puzzle through the problems I was facing with my game. I decided, after overcoming some rather major obstacles in my current game, that I would actually start writing this as a Blog, because I was already filling a notebook and a forum (This started out as a post on the Extra Credits forum) with my ramblings, why not inflict it on other people?
Content
So that is who I am and why I am here, so what can you expect from this? Well (Just to get this out of the way), despite my previous mention of Zoe Quinn inspiring me to game design... I am not here to be political. Honestly, I would be incapable of doing so. I have a decidedly middle of the road standing on most big issues, and while I can occasionally get riled up about something, I don't think it would be all that interesting to have you read me try to find a middle ground on everything. If something does effect me, and I feel I have to say something, I'll mark it clearly and make sure that you know it's a ranty political mess before you get too far into reading it. 90% of the time this blog, this will be a retelling of what I'm trying to muddle my way through in GameMaker or Unity. The other 9.95% of the time, on slow development weeks, or when I feel like it... we may get something about History, Geology, History of a Game's development (First blog about the history of game development going to be on Planetside 2, just going to tell you that right now), or maybe with time... tutorials on how to do things I found difficult to do.
So, there it is. Now that we are all on the same page, thanks for reading!
