What's up? Erick here.
This is not a blog post about how I became a great game developer that went through thick and thin to release my first game, nor how I joined a AAA studio. No, this is the history on how I managed to give up on learning the same thing twice, and now, I think I've finally learned to love it.
The Genesis
Dialing back a few years (roughly Q3 2018) just after starting college, getting my feet wet in programming through 101 classes.
The programming language? C.
Conditionals, loops, functions, and error handling, that's all I can recall doing in that semester, while the very barebones nature of C made things a little complicated, I've never hated, avoided or searched for alternatives for the language during that time period, not because I needed to get those grades, but I just liked to solve problems from the ground-up, it felt... rather thrilling.
Moreover, the next two semesters while still using C I got introduced to the world of ☆:~..Data Structures~..:☆, although I didn't love it, I didn't hate either, stuff just made sense but it didn't peak my interest at the time, little did I know that was my last contact with that language, at least within my academic curriculum.
So You Wanna Make Games
The year is still 2018, while working as a I.T intern at my college, during downtime I stumbled upon this video:
This awesome video its part 1 of a 10 episode series made by Riot Games, about the basics of how Game Development works called So You Wanna Make Games?? , I don't know why, but their explanation about Technical Art got me shooting for that position even though I knew nothing at all about how to make games nor how to make art.
At the time I was getting reeled into Web Development, as a consequence I lost contact with C, after watching that video I instantly got the itches to learn game dev as a hobby, so I went to google'd, game engines that use C++.
The first one that popped up was Unreal Engine, at the time I think the LTS version was 4.24, got my 512GB HDD and downloaded UE4 with Visual Studio, booted up, but, between having a weak PC and having a packed semester at college really turned me down on messing with unreal.
The conection
Jumping towards the end of 2019 the very same company that kindled a little bit of Game Dev spirit inside me a few months back, Riot Games, dropped this:
A trailer premiered during Riot's 10th Anniversary stream, showcasing its new FPS game made with Unreal Engine, a first for Riot Games too, being only a Indie Music Company at the time, its name? Project A. Being a CS:GO player during that time , this announcement brought fix to issues that the CS playerbase had for a long time, it was like a love letter for us TTS players, with that, they had my attention.
Fast forward two years, before Project A (a.k.a VALORANT) official release, around Q2 2020 the closed beta was announced, and the twitch requirement to get access got me watching all kind of streamers related to VALORANT, one of them was Riot Nu (Marcus Reid) a Riot Games developer that worked on VALORANT, got the beta key, watched a lot of dev talks and videos available about VALORANT, joined a few discord servers and submited a few bug reports at r/VALORANT, did that for the remaining of the year.
Something is cooking
Around 2021, VALORANT had their release and Riot Nu started his series on teaching Game Dev using Unreal Engine, that my dear readers, was the start of my second attempt on unreal's game development, with someone's guidance and a mildly clear schedule after work & college, I stuck through a little longer, even to make basic studies such as:
Around the same time, I got a new job as a software developer intern, so, in order to give my all, both at the new job and college I dropped unreal again. sigh
Third time's a charm
Fast Forward Q1 2023, graduated, web developer, full of spare time and bills while scrolling twitter, I saw this UE 5.2 print screen and it's newly UI so I decided to give it a shot, Downloaded the whole 9, opened for five minutes and closed it, suddenly the CS:GO Source 2 port rumours started rising again but this time, it seemed serious, so as joke I started to make CS:GO on unreal with only C++.
It turns out they took it personally and announced Counter Strike 2 a few months after that statement, by then I've already implemented a few things and a bunch of bugs like this one:
Come to find out that, trying to learn game development while making it mulitplayer is hard.
Still invested in this project having implemented, UI, few sound effects and basic mulitplayer components, such as, teams, damage, and inventory one thing I have to say, is that, even tough I only implemented two weapons to this game, I tried my best to make it so I could implement as many weapons as I wanted and I'm pretty proud of it.
Dialing up to Q4 2023 slowed down a bit to rework my portfolio and finally create a blog, but I'm already envisioning going back to the basics and learn game development using either OpenGL or Vulkan and documentating my journey here at this blog.
That's pretty much it, for now... Hoping this fire stays fiery(?) for a looong time.