ah! the refreshing feeling of getting back into an old, lapsed hobby and/or skill. recently, i’ve taken to dabbling in one of my old passions. a long time ago, before i decided on game development as my career, i was thinking about going into cybersecurity. i had a knack for burrowing into filesystems and finding gaps in protections early on in my dalliances with computers.

I feel like making things is intrinsically important to being the person I am. I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but when I’m not making something it feels a little like my existence is on hold. Not like I stop existing or anything, but more like… I’m just not really living when I’m not making something. It doesn’t have to be a public work, either; I don’t mind so much about the reaction to the thing as I do the fact that the thing has undergone the process of being made. It doesn’t always have to be finished; just the picking away at the creating is the key. And it doesn’t need to be big, sometimes just cooking a nice dinner satisfies the need to make!

I’m 33 years old today! That’s as many as three elevens, and that’s just dandy. As is my wont, I’m hammering away at my keyboard to get my birthday thoughts enscribed and on the internet for all to see. It’s been a pretty good year so far! I like to break the previous year apart into little bits when I do this, so here we go again:

Just wanted to share a link to this excellent post by Noel Berry, about making games with small frameworks. I absolutely adore doing this as well, and I feel like this post summarizes so many of my feelings about it in a very succinct and easy to understand way.

Recently, I’ve been playing the fantastic comedy imsim, Skin Deep by Blendo Games. It’s made in a spinoff of the Doom 3 engine, and has a built-in mod loader on the main menu, so I decided to crack open the game’s existing maps and figure out how to make my own! Read on for the things I found out, and how to get started yourself.