Welcome to The Walrus Game Project! A game coding tutorial blog that will almost certainly have absolutely nothing to do with walruses.
This is a personal project I figured I’d start, since I can never seem to complete making a game when I have no external motivation to do so. Thus, this blog idea was born. I’m hoping that by forcing myself to actually plan and write out my process ahead of time as though I’m guiding somebody through the steps I supposedly know, I’ll have a higher chance of success (defining success as the completion of a game project).
The following are my goals for this blog. For each project tutorial I write, I want to:
- Start with a clear vision
- This means picking an idea ahead of time and knowing what the end result will look like.
- Break down each project tutorial into manageable steps
- Each post should focus on a single concept or process.
- Provide source code, screenshots, and diagrams
- This will help me write clean code, force me to prototype as things progress, and design my code in a way that’s understandable enough to describe visually.
- Explain the why in addition to the how
- I’ve read plenty of blog posts and watched countless videos where the author/creator would provide code with little to no explanation of why the code works as it does, or why a certain strategy was chosen. I find much more value in tutors who explain their thought processes and observations than those who merely provide the how.
- Have fun!
- I know if I’m not enjoying myself as I do this, this blog will be very short-lived and I’ll have to find another way to motivate myself to finish my own projects.
My plan is to start each project with these in mind and define them in an introductory post. I plan on writing each post as I’m implementing that portion myself, effectively making this a sort of documentation process. That also means that I likely will have to do a lot of refactoring as the project matures and things pop up that I didn’t anticipate needing at the outset, but I think that’s a good thing. The journey is just as important as the goal in this case.
So with all that said, let’s do this thing!