The Start. — Alex Demers

Every great idea has to start somewhere and that’s exactly what this blog post aims to do. First, I want to welcome the intrepid reader who is currently reading my first post on this blog that I started. This is going to be where I document all my progress on the game I’m making however I first should probably tell you a bit more about both myself and this game.

I started out taking a keen interest in programming when my cousin showed me a small snippet of code in a notepad document and told me that that’s what code did. He never ran the code and I don’t even know if it would have worked or not however it got me interested.

I decided to sign up for the grade 11 programming class in high school and made my first couple of games there. They were terrible, to say the least, but they got the ball rolling. I remember the platformer I made which was rather ambitious of me had so many flaws the biggest one being you could jump while not grounded and just glide over the level.

After my adventures in games in grade 11 I continued programming in grade 12 this time using Java. We made some simple programs one of them being the game of life. I was enjoying my time in this class and decided I wanted to go into video game development. I went to Georgian College graduated their computer programming co-op course and I went into the industry. Not game development mind you software development.

I spent about 1 year in software development and after I decided to leave for the game industry however I wasn’t aware how to break into it. I decided to go back to school to get some game development experience under my belt and I graduated from Toronto Film School with Distinction at the top of the class (There were only 3 other people who graduated with me). I still struggled to get into the video game industry. It turns out it’s a very saturated market. So here I am writing this post about this game I’m making. Who knows how this game will turn out? Will I publish it? Maybe someday, Maybe in 2 years. The important thing is I will walk you through everything I’m doing and you’ll see my ideas turn into a game in real-time. Sorry about this little spiel. If you’re still reading I’m impressed now let’s get into why you’re here, the actual game.

The 3d Platformer. Name TBD.

Names aren’t exactly important so for now we’ll just refer to the game as Spire. A little unoriginal but whatever it gets the job done.

Spire originally started out as a concept for a Game Jam I took part in. It was a group of a few random people including me and one of my friends from Toronto Film School. We envisioned a 3d platformer that involved two different worlds a dark and light world and certain things changing depending on the world. It didn’t do a whole lot and the original concept is still on itch.io however I don’t remember the name and I never put it up on my account so I can’t currently link it. (maybe one of these days I’ll get a link for it)

The game started out pretty bad. We bit off more than we could chew as all game jam games go and it was a 3d platformer in first person which is just an absolute terrible idea. I’ve done some changes around got rid of all of the scripts that game used so far and started from scratch with just the art assets, the concept and my own design. I turned it into a 3rd platformer and have put in a bit of work on it. So let’s see how it plays.

Not too shabby. I think it’s a great starting place anyways. One thing to note the camera controls have been implemented on keyboard/mouse however not gamepad. I do tend for this game to be played mostly through a gamepad however I also do not plan on making it hostile to keyboard users, Next week I’ll give an update on the camera controls and I’m going to add to take you through my process of adding wall jumping. Stay tuned to see a more in-depth blog post next week. I wanted to get this started for awhile and I’m glad I have.