Its been a about 3.5 years now since I made the decision to “just make games” (that counts time before I started blogging) instead of waiting for the perfect time to get adventurous. It was a good decision; I’m busier now that I’ve ever been but I’ve slowly but surely pushed myself. I finally made public releases, participated in jams, and most recently even started working on my own personal framework in Haxe with OpenFL. Being busier, arguably, has made me more disciplined in my time usage (more time != more productivity, FYI.) Sure, I haven’t rocked the world with anything insane… yet. But I’m farther along now than I was 3.5 years ago, easily.
Its been good. Things have been up and things have been down. But one thing that hasn’t seen much attention as of late: this blog.
Honestly, a lot of my major game dev achievements up to this point have come in stints. I’ll participate in a jam or contest and you’ll see a little bit from me here and there. But I don’t feel like that’s good enough anymore. And now that I’m trying to pull together multiple years of fragmented experience into the #1GAM experience, now seems to be a better time than ever to infuse some new energy into this blog.
I’m saying I think its time to re-haul the blog.
Its easy to develop on an island. After all, a lot of “ugly” stuff goes on behind the computer screen as you try to clean up haphazard code or struggle with character art that looks like a vacuum cleaner holding a banana. But this kind of vulnerability may be more of what people should see. The game dev life isn’t all flowers and chocolate, and if I sit in my coder cave and only come out when I have a finished product… well, the world may have another game and I hope to produce stuff that really does make an impact, but there’s a whole window of opportunity I’m missing for one of the things I want to do: to reach out and help people through my coding and game dev. Even if its just a blog post detailing my struggles for the week, maybe it’ll at least console someone that their problems aren’t unique.
I have to make some decisions on how to reorganize this thing but as I wrap up this month’s #1GAM endeavor I plan to fire this bad boy up again. It may still take awhile to beat things into shape, but I’ve already been sloshing through this stuff for over three years, so why stop now? Its incredible to think about how long its been, actually, and perhaps even more so to think about where I’d be had I not started when I did. But we all have to start somewhere.
So get ready. Get ready for quick drive-by looks at half put-together projects. Get ready for code snippets resembling hieroglyphics. Get ready for whatever, whenever, wherever.
Get ready. 🙂
Photon Game Development 
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