This is my first try at a blog so go easy ;-) forgive the lengthy first post!

I started teaching myself Unity back during the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK in March 2020. Loaded with a few Udemy courses I started on my Game Dev journey - properly. before hand, back in Aug 2018 I moved to a role that would see me teach students (post compulsory education age) the basics of Python Programming and Linux Bash scripting. Whilst teaching I didn't agree with its delivery - very dull console outputs and arbitrary statements to show individual coding fundamentals. I worked better with context - whilst basic maths functions got me some of the way other elements required more. Basic instructor training taught us about Blooms taxonomy and more importantly the gamification of learning. Cue introduction to PyGame and developing lessons that consolidated learning through the creation of a simple 2D platformer.

Lets fast forward 18 months and the start of lockdown, training had stopped and all staff were at a loose end - for a short while. This is where Unity came in and the Udemy courses. And the bug was caught. Though I will admit I dabbled in Unreal quickly - Didn't like the UI so left that for the time being. Unity3D it is - all the way.

So, plenty of Udemy, YouTube videos and following pathways on Unity Learn gets me to a place where I'm comfortable enough to build something. Anything. But what? Finishing course projects is good enough to keep my little lads happy for a while. Unity ran a competition when they released the Ninjago microgame and I build a great (I think so anyway!) one-button game, but I missed the deadline so now its just a memory in my…..err memory!

OK. I get it - less of the history, get to the point Nevo! OK, OK here we are. The dream game. Well the original idea was to build everything from scratch - and I did mean everything. So lets play with blender….

This turned out to be more difficult than I first thought! And whilst I love the creative side of blender and the kudos of creating my own art work it just wasn't feasible for me to do everything like this.

So I tried a bit of the open source software - Make Human. This was a ready made humanoid solution but it still didn't cure the itch. Remember when I said about context? that's what I needed the most for everything and I wasn't getting that through making everything myself.

That's when I came across Humble Bundle - just as they were doing a massive Synty Studio bundle. BRILLIANT! everything I needed and I love the style of it.

Now we're at October 2022 and I've a nice sized catalogue of Synty Assets I start my first real proper level design - with the idea in mind that this is going to be the Vertical slice/Demo level - show off a bit of everything that I intend for the game, a plan of around an hours raw gameplay. this would be split across 3 main sections with the player starting in the wooded/green area in the right hand side of the map (under the cloud).

So with the level created of sorts I started work on the gameplay elements - but lets leave that for another entry.

Thank you all for sticking with it till now - if you're still here that is. I'm going to try and post weekly from this point on - for the time being I have enough content to achieve that task. Committing to a weekly post will also maintain the motivation to give you updates - especially if you've stuck with it till now - its the least you deserve.

Thank you for your time - until next week….