About Me
Hello! My name is Spencer Smith. I’m an undergraduate student, studying Bioinformatics at BYU with the hopes of going on to medical school. That seems to put me on a path where making games shouldn’t be very important or practical for me, but I really love it, and here’s why:
I’ve enjoyed games since I was very small. My first gaming was on our old Windows ’95 machine, playing Space Invaders, Missile Command, Asteroids, Centipede, and the like. I then moved on to GameBoy, playing Pokemon, Wario World, Croc and others. On top of that, I was the kid who played video games at my friends’ houses just about any chance I got.
As my interest grew, I began to conceptualize how I would make my own games. What would they be like? What would the mechanics be? I may have been turned on to this too young, because despite my desire and interest, efforts to learn programming or a game engine proved difficult and I ended up feeling pretty defeated by it. I put it all aside for several years.
When I was finishing up my Associate’s Degree (I was 17 and in High School, thanks to concurrent enrollment), I decided to take use my elective classes to take some programming classes. As I had matured quite a bit and with the structure (and deadlines!) of a class, I quickly understood and then fell in love with programming. I found myself working much longer on my programs, adding extra polish, even if they were just a silly Tic-Tac-Toe game or number generator.
About the “Twelve Games, Twelve Months” project
With my new experience, I decided to revisit the prospect of making games, but I’m sorry to say it hasn’t borne any fruit. I’ve tinkered with different languages and frameworks and engines and libraries for the past 5 years, including (but not limited to): Unity, Game Maker Studio, Unreal Engine, SFML, XNA, Godot, and Flixel for ActionScript; but I produced nothing. I would pick an engine, do some tutorials, then try to make my own game, but eventually lose interest when I ran into a problem and then I’d give up after awhile. I’d tell myself I just didn’t have the time, skills, resources, whatever.
After this process had repeated quite a few times, I came to the conclusion that my problem wasn’t skills or time or resources, it was that I was picking projects that were beyond me. Games that I’m not sure ANYONE could produce, least of all myself. I would come up with an idea that I liked and then grow it and grow it and grow it until it was way out of my league. I determined the following:
I won’t be able to make the game I want until I start making games, and I won’t be able to start making games while I’m trying to make the game I want. I had to give up on one or the other, so I decided to put making games that I wanted to on the backburner for awhile, until I had more experience. I’d seen challenges for making quick games before, but the time frame of jams like Ludum Dare scared me. When I stumbled upon the #1GAM challenge, I knew I had found the right place.
My goal for the next year (August 2016-July 2017) is to produce one game a month. Some may be more rough than others, some may feel like mere prototypes. I can’t account for great art or audio as they aren’t really my area of expertise. But I’m determined to make SOMETHING every month. I’m hoping by the end of it, by next year, I’ll be a little bit more qualified to begin work on some of the more ambitious projects I have in mind.
About the blog
This blog is (mostly) an effort for me to keep up a development blog as I work on this challenge. And honestly, it’s more for me than anyone else (and if anyone other than my wife is reading this right now, I’m impressed), to document my struggles and maybe some day look back on them with some degree of pride.
But, I also recognize that I’m not the first person to do something like this and I won’t be the last. Maybe someone might stumble upon this blog and it may provide a bit of encouragement or show how to do something.
I hope to write about two or three times a week to give updates on my progress, show how I solved (or failed to solve) problems, and very occasionally give updates on life happenings, were relevant. Given that this blog is a side project for my side project, which I’m doing on top of school, work, and other life commitments, it may fall by the wayside at times, for which I apologize.
Twelve Games, Twelve Months 