Surprise! I'm back

This game is back in production! I know, hard to believe after not touching it for like 2 years. 

So, why the wait?

Back in 2021 when I came up with the idea for this game, I realized very quickly just how little I actually knew about game development and programming.  At this time I was just a illustration major who took 1 game art class and fell in love with the medium. There was such a long journey ahead of me if I wanted to create the game of my dreams. So, I put the project on hold and started to learn the fundamentals.

While still getting my degree, I crammed as many game classes that I could while still meeting my illustration credits to graduate. I took some programming classes, game art classes, and even snuck game concepts into my non-game art projects! Even for my illustration capstone (senior project) I created concept art for a visual novel type game since those games are very illustration heavy. I was super stoked after finishing and graduating that the following summer I dove straight into Unity Fungus and started making Cryptid Campsite!

Although I learned a lot about the production stage of gaming, I also learned the hard way how easily it was to get burnt out... Pro tip, don't make a game that is heavily writing based if you absolutely loathe writing!

I took a long hiatus not only from game development, but from art too. It wasn't until I started working a part time job that I started to get antsy not doing anything mentally or creatively stimulating. Only problem was I didn't know where to start!

But, why come back to this?

Long story short, I took CS50 and learned the language of coding. Boring, I know! Except...it wasn't? Although lots of those programming languages I will never use, holy hell did it light a fire under my ass. Halfway through the course, I found myself itching to return to this project as my means of trying unity not just for the building engine, but for dabbling with my new knowledge of C.

I forced myself to keep trucking through CS50 though and only allowed myself to return to the brainstorming phase so that I wouldn't go and burn myself out with too much learning at once. By the time I finished CS50 course (aside from the final project bc bleh) I was ready to take a stab at unity again!

Ok, where is the dev logs?

Weeellllll.... I've been doing a lot of learning again. Turns out just knowing C# is just the beginning! I've dabbled in state machines, scriptable objects, got confused and scrapped both, started from scratch to understand player controllers, then found my way back to enemy state machines again, and finally integrated a plug and play scriptable object for my enemy ai once I could fully wrap my head around it. My poor github history can attest to all the screaming, crying, raging fits it took before I could actually figure out a system that worked for me, and an enemy that actually (sorta) feels alive and fun to kill!

And, that brings me here!

Now that I feel I've got the framework in place, I'm in a comfortable enough spot to start the slow climbing of the production stage. Cant say how frequent the devlogs will be while I'm working a job on the side but ya bitch gonna get it done one way or another! Just like Clara I intend to claw my way to victory one way or another!

See you on the yellow brick road™  path!