I’m a master of excuses and I’ve made plenty in the past two years to avoid writing this blog post. My excuses? I didn’t know what to write about, and nothing excited me enough to write about it.

That ends today. I am going to write about developing my first indie game.

Before I get into that, a quick summary of me. I’m a front-end software engineer working full-time from home for a brand you’ve most likely heard of. I’ve built websites for a living since 2020, but I’ve played video games for much, much longer.

To keep my first post short, I’m combining those two interests to learn indie game development. Funny enough, that means learning even more disciplines I’m interested in: UX design, art, narrative writing, marketing, and much, much more.

I don’t know what my first game will be about, but I do have a game mechanic in mind that I want to build the game around. I’m certain about three things so far: it will be a roguelite, it will use pixel art (said to be the easiest art style to learn), and it will be turn-based.

I abandon many things. Even things I was once excited about. But this time will be different. I’m making a commitment to myself: work on my game at least once a week, then write about what I learned, how the game is going, or anything else worth mentioning. See you next week!

What I’m playing

Pathogenic — You play as a pathogen attacking the human body. The sheer number of synergies you can build around leaves me gobsmacked. One of my builds leaned heavy into spawning minions to fight beside me. Another gained big benefits from taking damage. I haven’t beaten the final boss yet.

Void War — FTL is one of my favorite games of all time. Void War is FTL cranked up to 11. It adopts a lot of the original game’s mechanics and systems but does a great job expanding on each. I’ve beaten the final boss once.