Lets get this started

So, welcome to Developing Light, an open source game development challenge I'm posing to myself. See, I've always been a gamer and development is my day job, so naturally I've always thought that making a game of some sort would be pretty interesting. I've kicked this idea around for a while now, but never really acted upon it. Lately I've had a little game idea that I just couldn't shake so I decided to finally give it a go.

Now, I don't claim to have all the skills required to build a game. I'm a competent enough developer in languages like Java and C#, but this has mainly been in the web development space. Game development is a different beast entirely, so I'll have to learn along the way. I tend to think I have VERY mild artistic tendencies, and certainly can't do sound or music at all. That will all be a challenge too. I'll cross those roads when I get to them. I figure I'll take it a day at a time. If I stare off and look at all the things I CANT do, I'll never start and thus never accomplish anything at all (this, by the way, applies to most anything in life).

As for the open source part...well, I'm certainly not going to spend any money on this. I figured it might be fun to see what all I can do with free tools exclusively. In turn, whatever it is I create in this process will be freely released.

Now, in addition to skills and resources another thing I lack here is time! I'm a father, I work a steady job and I'm a raid leader in my World of Warcraft guild to boot! This leaves precious little time to go around developing masterpieces. Just another part of the challenge. I don't intent to stay up nights working on this. This is a hobby, something I'll do for fun. It may take a long time, but I'd like to see it through.

You may ask, "Isn't it a bit vain to be blogging about this?" Well, maybe. I figured my process of discovery here might interest people. I'll post about what I'm working on and what I'm learning. I'll post code samples for the geeks who care, and maybe get ideas from comments, should people ever read this. :). Its also accountability. If I'm keeping a blog up to date it will keep me moving on the project, as long and drawn out as it may be.

So here we go. I don't know where we'll end up. Maybe there will be a fun game I can release in a year or so. Or maybe I'll fail. Either way, it will be fun!

Next time I'll talk about the tools I plan to use.