Dev diary #0.0.001
A beginning before beginnings
The Dev Diary series will document my journey as a beginner game dev, tackling a huge undertaking. This won’t be about whether I succeed (though that would be nice) but about the journey to get there and the things I learn along the way. There are many zeroes because it will likely be a long journey.
👋🏼Hello JOMT Reader!
Let me start by saying, I have no idea how I’m supposed to make a game.
I suppose I could ask around but as I discovered in the past couple of months, following in the footsteps of someone else doesn’t always work. There’s a lot more than “just follow these steps” that we don’t talk about implied in these steps. One of those things is how we think: we often forget that these steps worked for the person because of the specific way their brain is wired. If yours isn’t wired in the same or similar way, the steps might not work for you.
So, this series is not a guide. Don’t follow it step by step because it probably won’t work for you. But I do hope you can take the journey and take the parts that make sense to you.
A framework for frameworks
I’ll be the first to admit, I am not good at planning. Details that I thought I liked bore me and I much prefer jumping in and figuring things out. But even I could see that jumping in would be a speed run to confusion and giving up. So, I got down to planning.
Except, I didn’t really know what I was planning for. Features of the game? Gameplay mechanics? Music? Sound effects? How do they all tie together? I was already overwhelmed before I had typed a single line of code.
I recently discovered that my brain works best when I can physically move and reorder pieces of information around freely. I’ve used bound notebooks for as long as I can remember and 2026 was the year I finally realized I am done with sequentially ordered notebooks. I’ve been taking notes on post card-sized pieces of paper and have not looked back. [Warning for stationery lovers, don’t read the following: I even unbound a bound notebook to steal its pages for me to use.]
Because these loose pieces of paper have helped me so much, I thought it would be of great help for my game dev journey too. Except, I didn’t want to be handwriting an entire codebase for a game. I looked for a digital equivalent of what I was doing in real life.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a single tool that could satisfy my needs. Some were too complex or forced you into The Nine Levels of Folder Hell. So I built one.
This is an incomplete portion of the note and graph editor I built to get me organized. It fulfills a number of needs:
Easy to take notes: double click and a blank note shows up
Can move things around
Can connect and reconnect nodes
I’ve built other features but these were the features that I needed first.
Many hidden considerations
As soon as I built this note taking app, I started filling it out with whatever came to my head regarding the game. Gameplay mechanics. Playable factions. Unit attributes.
Before long I had notes that I could reorder and connect. Some ended up looking like an octopus; others were wearing their arrowed connections like a porcupine wears its quills.
But I was already seeing the benefit of a system like this. Frictionless idea capture followed by thoughtful reflection, organization, and linking time. This fit with the flow of thinking that I like to do.
And its this process that has allowed me to see just how big this project is going to be. Even for the attribute section (I’ll go into more detail on this in later logs), I realized I need to think about calculations on top of calculations. I don’t think I would have thought about that detail if I didn’t see all of my thinking laid out on a page like this.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step
As the Buddhist saying goes, I had to start somewhere. I chose to start by building a framework to build the framework of my game. Hopefully, it’ll withstand the dev process but I’ll stick with it until I need something else.
I’ll go into a bit more detail about what I’m thinking about for the core mechanics of the game in the next dev diary. Until then, a question for all of you:
How do you like to start your big projects? Do you jump right in? Plan it all out? When do you decide to move from planning to doing? Let me know in the comments below!