It’s been a while since I last posted, but I’ve been pretty busy since then. This semester, I committed to myself that I would be really involved with vgDev, Georgia Tech’s video game development club. I had ideas of really contributing to a team, of hundreds of commits on a really cool game that I’d be proud of at the end of the semester. But, right before the game submission deadline, I realized that a game I made over winter break may really fit the club.
Originally called “Kali and Kobe!,” the game was meant to be a Christmas present to my girlfriend. You were able to play and move around as her two dogs, Kali and Kobe, and explore the house I made for them. There was no real objective, no real gameplay loop for the player other than to chill and run around the house. Additionally, because I had never participated in vgDev at all the semester before, it felt wrong for me to just jump right in with a game and not work my way up to being a team lead. For these reasons, even though it was a great idea for a game submission, it never crossed my mind until the very end, where I submitted it on a whim. And I can say it was a great decision.
We’ve been hard at work this semester creating this new game, “Dog Days.” The goal of the game is to create an experience for the player where they can just relax and work on cool quests. We originally wanted to also add a house building system, but we decided that would widen our scope beyond our capacity.
The idea that I had to lead a team to work on a game was very daunting, especially in a club of hundreds of members. However, as the semester has gone on, I have slowly learned to harness our team’s energy and really “motivate the troops” to get some really good stuff done, such as building out the quest system, the inventory system, and the movement system. Overall, I’m loving it, and it’s definitely influenced what I want to do in my future career - be more design and vision focused in my software engineering work.