Craig Bavender

Update - 2024

Mar 17, 2024

Hello, world.

Four years ago I posted an update to this personal site saying:

"A few Sundays ago, I tweeted out stating my intentions to study a bit of game development, and embark on a custom project of my own. The entire reason I went into College studying Computer Science was that one day, my intention was to build my own games.

This something I'm very passionate about, and really honestly want for myself to accomplish. You can hold me accountable to that."

Well, a surprise, but none of that happened. Four years is a long time ago, and I'm surprised it's taken me this long to actually start that journey.

The entire reason I reopened this site's Git repo was to provide an update on what's been exciting me lately, and it's Game Dev. The past month I've been progressing through learning the basic of Godot.

I started with two very simple tutorials, but after completing the set, I realized how /bad/ tutorials can really be for development. You follow directions to a T and get X result. It's fast and addicting, and you feel like you're making fast progress. My worry with that is, if I were thrown into a project at any stage of development, and were asked to "do X, Y, or Z" I would have zero clue how to do anything. Because of that, I quickly ran far, far away from "tutorial hell" and instead opted to strategize a bit more for my hands-on type of learning style:

I'm committing myself to learning this entire year. I understand that getting into and even being successful at something like Game Dev is a lengthy journey. I'm set out to produce very small, extremely focused projects every 2-4 weeks based on a particular set of learning. This will be akin to spending 2 weeks on menus. 2 weeks on learning player movement, collisions, and hitboxes. 2 weeks on integrating art into animations, etc. This should allow me to be hyper focused on one thing at a time and learn as I go.

Ultimately, if things go well, 2025 I want to try to publish a game myself.

All that said, today marks 2 weeks since starting my first "tiny" project:

Small project #1: Tile Based Player + NPC map:

  • Project was 100% from scratch
  • Disregard the black / broken looking trees. :) I was more focused on collisions and learning about GDScript here.
  • Player movment via WASD keys. Ctrl button to attack
  • Hitboxes and Collision boxes are "visible" for debugging (See the player hitbox flash "red" when Attack state is active)
  • NPC movement is randomized, and optimized to push away / avoid collision with the edge of window (walls)
  • NPC has a Health stat, player has Speed and Attack stats

This week will start Project #2, which I think will be a focus on "Menus".

Thanks for reading.

- Craig