About the blog

This blog is a tracking of progress through the making of an indie exploration game. I feel like it would be interesting to see a game being built through screen shots and video and would like to share it to any one who is interested.

About myself: I am and fine art graduate and avid game player that lives in California. Up until about two weeks ago I never thought I would be able to make a game. After countless tries with "simple" game making programs, I felt that I was in over my head and should just stick to playing the games. That was up until I played the recently revamped Dear Esther. I had read about the game earlier when it was made with the Source SDK and was free to play. I downloaded the free game and played about 2 minutes before I went and bought the revamped version on Steam. I played through it twice in one night. The story and the overall feel of the game was so unique and impressive that it finally gave me the confidence to jump into making my own. I downloaded the Source SDK and started playing around with it. Within five minutes I faced my first challenge: how do I make a floor? All it took was a quick Google search and I found one of the greatest communities of indie game developers. I quickly started making my first "level." After working with the SDK for two work nights (more to come on when I work on my game and why I can invest enough time later) for about 18 hours, I ran into what you could call a boundry wall. I'm not saying that I "mastered" Source SDK in less then twenty hours, but I did feel like I was being limited, and that there had to be engine that I could use to further my new found interest in game development. Another quick search on Google and a hour or so sifting through forum discussions and research I settled on the Unity game development engine. After downloading the program and a few tutorials I made this:

Not incredibly impressive, but none-the-less I had officially made a world that could be walked around in in first person. By the end of the night, I had made my first "level" in Unity.

Although rough around the edges, and small in size, I had made something I never thought I could. A rush of ideas and plot lines started rushing through my head. I began going back to short stories I had written, getting ideas for level designs and plot, until I finally started writing a plot line that closely followed my short story Doorknob. 

The game: The current working title right now is Letter. It may change into something else. A quick synopsis of the game is a writer who has recently suffered a (currently) unknown trauma is now stuck in his own stories, questioning the world around to be reality or his own created fiction. The story progresses much like Dear Esther, a voice over narrated by the writer himself as he goes through these different worlds, remembering his surroundings as either reality, fiction, other literary tales, or a strange combination of the three. For gamers: there will be no combat, no real puzzles, but instead a exploration through a created world and driven by a strange story. For literary buffs: I plan on referring to a few of my favorite writers and stories from those writers as small nods to there works.

The next post I will show the building of the first world, mainly in Unity and Maya.