Greetings,
and welcome to FoxApoGames, a personal project. I find the blog form to be a great idea to share my feelings and insights on topics that are close to me. I have chosen the wordpress platform because it is easy to maintain and I didn’t want to spend time developing my own cms platform. If you know of a better solution, feel free to drop me a note in the comments. On wordpress I found a great minimalist template smntcs-retro. I chose this template because I wanted something that would be most similar to where I am and what I actually do. I spend most of my time in Linux and the command line, and secondarily in a text editor writing scripts or editing configs. This template reminds me of that and I think it represents my environment very nicely.
And why am I writing this blog anyway? Last year I got into game development. For the first time in my career, I was doing something I really enjoyed and was happy to come to work. For a while, I felt like one of those successful people who found their dream job and were going about “doing their thing”, but then a big change came.
The project ended and the fun stopped. I was energized and confident that I would find a new job in the game industry. So I was confident that I quit my job and bought courses on Udemy, started watching tutorials on YouTube, and ideally would find a new job within a month. I even signed up for GameJam.
GameJam was awesome, I worked with about 5 other random people from all over the world. Within a week we had a 2D platformer that was unplayable, but I was proud of the fact that we managed to finish it even in the chaotic conditions. It was another kicker for me.
Of course, nothing is as rosy as it seems and this utopian idea that I would find a job within a month made me so miserable that by the turn of the year I still had no job, spent most of my savings and fell into depression.
I had to look elsewhere, so I put the game dev on hold and started focusing on more “casual” IT positions in the market. Even there I started to realize that I didn’t really know how to do anything properly and the depression grew.
Luckily, I found a job sometime in early February 2020, just before the start of Covid-19, and I didn’t even get fired. They say I’m doing my job well! That helped me and I started to feel better.
State of emergency was on the way and plenty of time at home. So I started streaming, picked up a few followers, dusted off the YouTube channel a bit and even got back into game dev.
Admittedly, I’ve been playing games more the last few months, I won’t lie to you, but summer has arrived and with it my next GameJam. I signed up for GameDev.tv’s Community Game Jam, the creators of those Udemy courses I already wrote about. The topic was time and I was given 30 days to make a video game. During those 30 days, we moved to a new flat, so I dropped out for a while, but I was still able to schedule the development process and get the game finished and submitted. You can check out the result here on itch.io.
My passion to game dev is coming back and I feel the desire to get better again! And that’s also the reason why I started this blog. It’s going to be my game dev journal!
I have started the project foxapo.com.