Game Development Updates

General Updates on fun projects

It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. I figured it was time to share an update on what I’ve been working on recently.

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Brandy Byte Games

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on getting my new site brandybytegames.com up and running. Since I registered the business and domain name it’s been sitting dormant, just showing a single picture of Brandy and a line saying it was still under construction. It’s built using the same tech this site is, using Astro with a small blog component to share updates through a dev log. Eventually I plan to share short videos alongside those posts.

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Games

I’ve started a repository of some of the components I’ve been building as part of this first project. It’s serving as a pretty good place to test things in isolation before I move on to the real one with so many moving parts. It’s also helping me keep things decoupled from other systems. Hopefully this will help when I build more in the future, rather than copying from old projects and ripping out the glue.

As for the game I’ve been working on, I’m hoping to playtest it within the next couple of months. It’s really nice seeing months of work starting to come together, even if it doesn’t look the nicest. There have been so many skills that I’ve had to learn or practice to get to this point, and it’s starting to feel like it’s paying off. Everything can be improved later, you just need to have something first. This first game isn’t my “dream game”, just a game that I’m interested in making that will serve as my first shipped product.

In the background, just as I think of them, I write down ideas I get for different games. In some cases, they’re ideas for other projects I’ve wanted to work on. Story and mechanics are still being written up for the big dream game.

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Writing

Recently, I’ve tried getting a little more into writing. Not only do I want to improve for my game development journey, I also need to find other creative outlets to express myself while struggling with the stress of impending layoffs at work. This blog has been pretty nice in helping with that, but I think this is the next step I need to work on.

I used to love writing stories as a kid, but those were usually completely crazy and incoherent stories involving Mario characters - along the lines of SMG4’s videos but back in the mid-late 00s (for the real ones, I was on Lemmy’s Land frequently). I attribute the loss of this fun to the transformative experience that was middle/high school for a nerd in southeast Ohio. For that reason, I think it’s time I take it back.