10-10-2022 : Computer Upgrade Time

I've finally bit the bullet and ordered myself a whole wack of new computer componenets. It's been about 5 years since I got my current desktop, and it's starting to show its age. Generally it can still run the games I throw at it, but as I continue to learn Maya and Blender, and start working in VR, I need something more powerful than my poor GTX1060 3GB. Thankfully crypto is slowly but surely dying- that combined with the 40 series dropping in about week, and I actually managed to get myself a GTX3060ti for under MSRP! I'm super excited, this will be my first time building a PC proper, my current PC is just a pre-built I've tinkered with over time (back then, I got some good deal that made the pre-built cost less than assembling it myself).

It's exciting though, man, I can't wait to check out games like HL:A and Boneworks, and also commit some time to picking up Unity again. For some strange reason, no matter what I do, I cannot install Unity on this PC, and it's been killing me. I've settled with Godot in the meantime, which I actually massively prefer, but I know Unity is industry standard and all that, and it's gonna be super important for upcoming semesters.

The sage advice of many veteran devs is to 'just make a lot of games', which makes a lot of sense, it's hard to learn without experience. But also. Holy shit is it hard to make a game, and of course the people giving this advice know this- but I also think they forget what it's actually like to sit upfront of your computer for 2 hours trying to fix your character glitching down a slope. I also think a lot of industry veterans never went through the solo dev gauntlet that is itch.io + steam, where games are effectively disposable, whereas back in the 80s-90s and earlier, it was impressive just to have software that ran, effectively guaranteeing an audience, even if you don't have a perfectly polished game.

Personally, I find it hard to work on something as big as a game if I don't think it will find an audience, and therefore get stuck with excessive projects which hit a roadblock and never truly get off the ground...
That being said, hey look at this over-ambitious project I'm working on lmao. It's gonna be called something like SEWER PHREAKZ or SLUDGE KILLERZ, a fast-paced single-player mobility shooter made in Godot.

The sketches are rough, because what I'm imagining in my mind's eye is hard to sketch. I'm not sure how people traditionally go about sketching movement mechanics, or if they even do at all. Anyways, whatever you can scrounge from the images here is all I'll give, cause I wanna keep most of the game secret for the time being. But get excited, cause this may or may not be coming within the next year or two! Once I get the engine working properly and loaded-up with my own custom assets, I'll post a blog (devlog?) about it! Hopefully hopefully hopefully by the end of the year...