"Hello World!".

Welcome to my humble little corner of itch.io. In true IsItReady fashion, here's my first official post. Grab a soda or a beer, a bunch of snacks and get comfy. This is gonna be a ride!!

I'm the Anomalous SpaceFarer online, or Wayno in real life, a 45 year old solo amateur game developer living on the eastern coast of Australia. I am a lifelong tinkerer and very passionate about woodworking and game development, currently mastering the Godot game engine.

My first exposure to programming came about when my parents bought me a Commodore 64 for my 10th? birthday. I quickly began to Peek and Poke my way around the BASIC language, typing out whole pages of code from gaming magazines brought home from the local newsagent. From there I discovered assembly language(ASM), and I was hooked!! I felt like I'd been given exclusive access to the inner workings of the 6502 CPU. I really did take to it like a duck to water. After much trial and error I was able to write a program in pure assembly that would take joystick input and move a sprite around on the TV. Then my life kind of took a detour into exercise and fitness and my game development journey was placed on pause.

My first *upgrade* was to a PC, a 486 Dx2/66 with a turbo button that overclocked the CPU to 80Mhz. This arrived during my High School years, and Turbo Pascal was on the curriculum in our Computing class. Since I'd already had a very solid grounding with BASIC and ASM, picking up Pascal was a breeze. A couple of classmates and I quickly rose to the top of the class and when done assisting our classmates, would start messing around with perspective transforms and making bouncing logos and 3D starfields.

After that, I'd briefly dabbled with Delphi, which felt familiar due to it being built upon Pascal. From there I discovered C# and Microsoft Visual Studio and the XNA framework. "Why not build my own 3d game engine, from scratch?!" That was 14 years ago, wow how time flies. I got stuck while trying to figure out how to code collision detection and took another long break.

 Here's a link to my 5th progress video on Youtube for posterity: 

This pretty much brings us up to now. I'm sure my fellow gamedevs can probably relate, burnout is real. I had been struggling both in and out of the gamedev space for a significant while now. I'm now taking steps to make all of the things more nourishing and sustainable moving forward.

My current plan is to build several proof-of-concept prototypes, exploring and mastering the Godot game engine and uplifting each prototype from experience gained in the others, to the point where any one of them could become their own complete game with a little extra work.

I do have some world-building ideas in mind, and would like to intertwine all of my games in some way to this lore, but I'll keep those cards close to my chest for now. I prefer to be able to back up my outlandish claims with action. 

I'm building a community around my growth and progress with gamedev, I invite you to TMA(Tell me anything) about your game development journey, any roadblocks you faced and how you overcame them. So that you too can help me to motivate, encourage and inspire new and potential game developers take those first steps. It all starts with "Hello World!".

Thank you for reading this far. I really appreciate your support and am seeking fuel for my gamedev journey on my path to releasing my first fully polished indie game. My preferred fuel type is commenting / liking / subscribing to my related socials. I also get a SuperBoost from donations. Top contributors will get a mention as soon as I can figure out the best format for doing so.

I encourage and welcome all of the constructive feedback on what you think of my space.

Peace, Respect and Gratitude.