Making a Game for My Kids
Parenting and Video Games
As a parent with children that are now of the age where video games are fun and something they enjoy doing, it is my responsibility to help guide them so that they play and experience appropriate stuff. As a lifelong fan of video games, I would like for my children to appreciate them as I do. If I let them play games that they didn’t find fun or weren’t suited to their age, I might turn them off from them. Naturally, I started with the basics with Super Mario Bros for the original Nintendo, but played on the Nintendo Wii (though I should have a working original copy with the system in a box in the basement). So naturally, they are big fans of Mario and Luigi now (and my son and I even went as Mario and Luigi for Halloween once). I even convinced my son to go see Wreck-It Ralph in theaters because Bowser was in it. Though during the movie he was constantly asking me where Bowser was when he wasn’t onscreen.
Kids are also very imaginative sorts. After playing games for a bit, when I make them turn it off they will often reenact what they were just doing when playing by themselves (same goes for movies and tv shows). While doing this they will often change stuff around a bit, though I am not sure whether this is due to poor memory, physical constraints, or they are just having fun with it (likely a combination). Anyway, for whatever reason, my son came up with an idea for a game. He calls it Super Mario Cuckoo and you play as Bowser instead of Mario.
Side Projects and New Technologies
As a game developer, there are always new technologies that are out there. I particularly enjoy working with graphics, but it is also good to brush up on other areas of game making as well. I have previously played around with C# and XNA, though with XNA being deprecated and no longer supported, I looked into alternatives like SharpDX. This was a good to work with, but I had wanted to mess around with the new C++11 standard stuff. I also have been paying attention to OpenGL coming back in a pretty big way with mobile (and soon to be the web), and while I wanted to stay with PC development, it would be good to familiarize myself with it a bit more. Finally, I know that I am sorely lacking in my knowledge and ability with scripting languages. While there are many to choose from, I went with Lua because it is heavily used in the game industry and one that I had previously tried to learn. By making it a required part of the game that I am developing, it forces me to use it and thus gain the knowledge that I have been trying unsuccessfully to do before. Also, I hope that eventually that I can introduce my son (and daughter eventually) to programming and I think the fact that scripts can be updating very quickly will allow him a fun and easy introduction.
Ongoing Development
I admit that I have started many projects along the way and that I haven’t fully completed any of them. This is for a variety of reasons, such as a lack of focus or other priorities getting in the way. I hope that by doing this for someone else instead of just myself, it will keep my likely to stick with it to the end. I’ll also bring my kids on board to help with the development in some capacity, so that hopefully it can turn into something that we build together. This will likely take some time to do, so it might even be something they grow up with. But I hope it keeps their interest (and mine) and is something we can have fun with (and learn!) together.
Next time I post about this I will get into some details about the actual development.