(This has been reposted from my blog: Two Tangled Trees - Blog)
To some extent, development for The Ocean Blooms began over two years ago. I was taking a linear algebra course thinking that it would help get me into grad school. For several assignments we had to use Maple, which was my first exposure to programming. To my surprise, I was pretty good at using Maple and it was actually fairly enjoyable. Once the semester was over and I had not been accepted to grad school, I was left wanting some sort of intellectual or creative outlet. I've played games my whole life and on numerous occasions designed game concepts in my head. However, these were merely mental exercises to pass the time. I had never taken any steps or even considered taking any steps toward actually developing a game. The closest I came to developing a game was a couple years before this when I read an introductory tutorial on Game Maker, But seeing that some amount of programming was likely needed, I never pursued this option. Being forced to learn Maple showed me that programming wasn't as scary as it seemed. Within a week after the class was over, I opened up Python Programming: An Introduction to Computer Science by John Zelle (we had it on our bookshelf from a class my wife had taken the year before), and began teaching myself programming in hopes of making a game in the future.
This ended up being a long process. Over the next 8 months our so, I would spend a few hours every weekend trying to push through the book. When I was about 3/4th of the way through, I stopped. I had just worked on a chapter about python classes that I didn't understand. I had every intention of continuing, but after nearly two months went by, that seemed less and less likely. I'm not sure why, but I had one last burst of motivation one weekend and decided to just jump right into developing games. I knew I had an incomplete understanding of even some of the fundamentals of python, but I figured at this point is was either sink or swim. I downloaded Pygame and a copy of Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame: From Novice to Professional by Will McGugan. I never read the entire book, but I read enough to get me going. After another month or so, I had created a game I called This Always Ends Bad.
It was a really crude game. I worked with squares and circles because Pygame could draw those in code. That way I didn't have to draw anything myself and I wouldn't have to learn how to work with image files. There was no music or sound effects. And movement was correlated to the number of frames per second as opposed to time. That meant that on faster computers you everything would move master; on slower computers everything would move slower. However, none of this mattered. I was so excited to have created something that I believe most people would recognize as a video game. After showing it to Mandy, she said she wanted to do some artwork for it. At this point, This Always Ends Bad became the prototype for The Ocean Blooms.
