After a long hiatus from blogging and personal projects, I have decided to start blogging my journey into game development. The project comes as a result of the global pandemic. The 2020 winter is going to be a really long one, and I want to have a productive creative outlet to get me through the dark days. Having only coded some basic games like Frogger or Pong clones back in high school, the prospect of building a large scale game is very new to me.

My goals for the project are as follows:

  1. Write code using Rust. I have been learning the language off and on for the past few months, and feel productive enough now that I want to really kick the tires in a large, complex code base.
  2. Target web (web-assembly) so I can share the results with friends and to the Internet in general (i.e. here)
  3. Start simple, and improve one small step at a time.
  4. Explore non-standard game worlds (i.e. not fantasy setting) and/or non-standard story elements, as a creative outlet.
  5. Try to avoid over-complicated mechanics or story elements for this initial game. Those can come later, once I’ve gotten a first real game working.

All of that out of the way: what kind of game do I want to make? An RPG. Initially I was leaning heavily into the prospect of developing a rogue-like RPG, but I think I will instead focus more on a JRPG-style 2D tile-based RPG. The main reason for JRPG over rogue-like is that I prefer the separate mode turn-based battle system, and I also find the tiled graphics and exploration to be more engaging.

I have already done some prep work to prepare for this, working through some online game tutorials in Rust:

I plan to post updates on progress weekly.