Hey guys! I decided to kickoff the start of a new semester with a Developer Journal to track my learning and progress in development and work on my own game.

To start things off, I am Christina, but you all can call me CC for short, and I plan on trying to get at least one entry up every week to two weeks in this journal.

This summer has already been a very insightful and in my opinion a very important time for me. I came to the realization that I wish to at least attempt to make games for a living (options are still open at this point though) and I started to try and learn what I could with very little instruction. This in and of itself has proven to be a bit difficult as I am just now learning GUI programing in class, but at the same time it is already showing me that I am more than willing to take on the difficulties that this path will likely give me.

I decided to keep things easy to start off and decided to just play around with a few things here and there to kind of get the feel for things. My first project was going through a GameMaker tutorial that I found on this site, which i was able to get to work for the most part. I did run into a bug at the very end where it wouldn't restart the game after clicking "Play Again," but for my project I was still extremely proud of myself.

From there I got an idea for a simple maze game where the player must collect gems to unlock the door to the next level with the hopes of having it work on multiple platforms. I haven't gotten very far with it, and have done absolutely no coding for it, however, I have been able to begin level development. It's only one level so far and I can already tell I likely need to fix something on it, but slow progress is better than no progress at the moment. To design the levels I am using a combination of graph paper and overhead projector sheets, with the main map of the maze on the graph paper, and things such as the route out of the maze, the gems and lock, enemies, and obstacles on separate projector sheets, each with it's own layer. Once I am ready I plan on using these as a guide to build it in Unity.

All of this as then led up to two wonderful finds I have come across in the last couple of weeks. The first is that I have access to a site called lynda.com (which has a normal monthly member cost of $30 USD) for free through my univeristy which has allowed me to find a number of tutorial videos for using Unity and learning C# (I'm currently following one to make a tile map editor). And the second was that my university has a video game develop club and they run the club like a class for most meetings where they teach one meeting and have a workshop the next. A win win for me! I've already been made aware that the club will be attending the East Coast Gaming Conference in April, something I'm trying my hardest to ensure I can attend, and that we will be working on games as a club. With any luck I'll be able to make some huge progress over the next the year with their help.

That's all for now. Hopefully next time I will have pictures to upload to show the level I have so far for the maze game. Until then I hope everything has a wonderful weekend!