30 Days of Code
The past eighteen months have been fairly brutal, with high-pressure work deadlines and the global pandemic that has forced lockdowns, homeschooling, etc.
These commitments/restrictions have not left must time for personal growth and one of my regrets is losing my “connection to the keyboard”.
In short, I have not written a meaningful line of code in over a year.
As a geek, this situation pains me… It also means that my core technical skills have become a little rusty.
Therefore, I have decided to dedicate thirty minutes a day for the next thirty days (likely mornings or evenings) to write some code and hopefully learn a thing or two.
I have decided to set myself the challenge to build a 2D platformer game, targeting my five-year-old son. I have not written a game in several years and have historically focused on top-down shooters, therefore a platformer should be an interesting challenge.
Considering my target audience, the game will need to be fairly simple, but I plan to take inspiration from classics such as Super Mario World (SNES) and Mega Man X (SNES), as well as games that dominated my childhood such as Crystal Caves (PC) and Alex Kidd (Sega Master System).
I plan to use the cross-platform game engine GameMaker Studio 2, written in GML. The game will be made available for the PC with controller (PlayStation and Xbox) support.
If you would like to follow my progress, I plan to post short status updates (demos) to YouTube.
You can also view my backlog and code on GitHub.
Wish me luck! Expect another post in thirty days, which will hopefully include a video of the playable game.