Hi! I'm not sure if anyone will ever see this, but I've decided to start posting here so I can have a place to record my progress as I navigate learning the different aspects of game development. I'm currently attempting to teach myself the basics of C#, and I plan on moving on to trying to get a grasp on Unity when I finally update my computer. The one I have now def can't handle Unity. It can barely run Visual Studio Code as it is. My eventual goal is to create some kind of story-heavy 2D RPG. I have a long way to go, but I'm hoping that posting here will keep me motivated... and make me feel like I'm actually making progress on my goals.

To introduce myself, my name is Grace.  I never really considered myself a gamer when I was younger, but I did spend many hours playing Nintendogs on my DS and Mario Party on the Wii with my sister. I also loved those choose-your-own-adventure books when I was young and kind of always gravitated toward storytelling with branching narratives. As a teenager, I spent most of my time reading fantasy and sci-fi books - bonus points if there was romance in them. I knew I loved reading, and eventually, that passion developed into an interest in writing as well. I tried and failed to write a full novel many times in my teens. One thing I did successfully complete, though, was a text-based choose-your-own-adventure game created on chooseyourstory.com. I won't mention the name of it because it is so embarrassing to me, but it was, of course, a fantasy romance game. I published it to the site in 2015 and, logging back into that account for the first time in years, it looks like it has been played over 3,500 times (which is way less impressive when you see that only about 200 people finished the fairly short game.

Something I loved about this kind of storytelling was that instead of following along a main character on their adventure, you got to choose where the story went and what kind of person you wanted the main character to be. But after publishing that game, I didn't really go anything more until about 3 years later. After high school, I went to college for creative writing and publishing. My creative writing side of my program was pretty much all writing books, short stories, poems, or some kinds of creative nonfiction, a little bit of scriptwriting here and there. I had all but forgotten my interest in creating choice-heavy story games at this point. But I ended up taking a branching narratives class in school, and one of our assignments was to create a playable branching narrative, which could take really any form you wanted. So of course I decided I was going to learn enough Python to create a game using RenPy - a visual novel creator.

The game I created revolved around the story of a girl who had recently died, and in the afterlife has been taken on as an apprentice to the three fates from Greek mythology. As the character trained, the player would be presented with a series of 'red lines of fate' that showed each person's life like a timeline, and the player would have to decide where to cut the thread... aka when that person would die. It was my first time adding visuals to anything I'd written, and I ended up finding backgrounds on a RenPy forum and creating sprites using my Sims 4 game. There was no music - that was way beyond my capabilities. It was also my first time creating variables and a point system in a game, as well as using if/else and true/false statements. 

The game was super linear with only 2 endings - good or bad - but I realized how much I loved playing around with coding and seeing what I could create with the tools I was slowly learning. When it was presented to the class and we all watched one of my classmates play through, I noticed how engaged the whole class seemed to be with my game - some even started discussing amongst themselves what choices to make in the game, which I consider a huge success since it actually mattered to them what to choose. After this, I ended up creating a second chooseyourstory.com game for a later class and continued to play around with RenPy, but I never fully completed another visual novel on it - though I did get pretty deep into a project I had titled 'Misty Falls' - a small-town detective type of game. Alongside all of this, I wrote ALOT for class and for myself. I half-finished a lot of things (2 novels, a short story collection, and more poems than I can count) and actually did complete the first draft of a novel - a way-too-long adventure/romance fantasy novel inspired by tarot cards. 

So now it's been 2 years since I graduated, and I've been working as a copywriter since then. I won't lie: I really don't enjoy it much, and just sitting down to write a short story or a poem doesn't engage me as deeply as it used to. It honestly felt like a lot of my creativity shrivelled up and died after graduation (the pandemic def also had something to do with it) and I've been struggling to get it back ever since. Now, after a serious creative dry spell,  I'm starting to remember that so many of the stories I want to tell involve CHOICE, and that games are the best way to tell a more vast, complex story that explores different paths and allows different outcomes based on the decisions each unique person makes.

So I am back to creating games. I've gone from a text-based game that required zero coding from me, to a visual novel that required at least SOME python knowledge, to a whole new goal of creating a game in Unity. I'm going to continue to slowly learn the basics of C# in my free time and might start looking through the Unity manual before even downloading it (I don't think I'll be able to upgrade my computer for a while). I'm thinking I should probably start practicing my digital art again (I have a working knowledge of GIMP and a mediocre level of artistic talent). I should also consider learning how to make music for my games, but this totally freaks me out, to be honest. It's not something I've ever really attempted before, so the learning curve is scary to me.

Anyways, I hope I can continue updating this as I go along. I'm a long way from actually creating a game, but I'll work on what I can in the meantime. 

P.S. I know I have a degree in creative writing, but I'm really just typing out my thoughts here and won't be editing the posts too much.