Initializing my Itch.io account

Hi ! I’m glad to start sharing what I do on this platform. A quick word about me since it’s my first ever post here.

My name is Felix, I am a french Fullstack developer working in the web industry. I am also a freelance music composer & sound designer. The mix and match of all of this is my preferred hobby, game development. As a lover of games, I have been amazed at how easy it actually is to start building games when you have the right tools. I discovered Unity 3 years ago, and I spend every bit of extra time I have trying things out on it.

After a year of learning the engine, in 2020, I decided to give a shot at making a small game to see if I could make something from start to finish. So I took a week off from work, asked my entourage for a theme, and got started, the theme was “One direction” and I learned. A. LOT.

Making a game from start to finish is a thrilling process, you have to make difficult choices to be able to make things work in the forced time-frame, so that means cutting down sometimes on quality, polish and other stuff to focus on what matters.

As I am a developer by profession, I started with the mechanics and gameplay first, plugging in controls, trying to figure out my way around what I wanted the game to look like and making things work with just blocks as sprites to start.

After getting the core gameplay to work, I decided to get some art for the game. I am very far from being an artist, but I managed to get a couple of pixel-art tiles to do the trick and look okay. I made a palette of these tiles in Aseprite and it then helped me shape the different worlds of the game and then made a little very simple character that ended up looking like an astronaut which made me decide the atmosphere for the game would be ambient and “in space”.

I then spent the most of the time in the week crafting levels. And jeez, creating puzzle levels is HARD ! I had to think about them from backwards, most of them had paths that I hadn’t anticipated creating gamebreaking shortcuts, I had to think about new mechanics in each new world, and the list goes on. Most of my time was consumed by the world building of this game. I spent so much time on it, that a day before the end of the challenge I had totally forgotten about sound and music. Thankfully, I know my way around music softwares and was able to create an ambient track that loops alright without being too anoying for the player to run in the game.

All in all, it was an amazing experience to build this game. And even though I’m writing this blog post more than 2 years after I made this game, it’s still the project that motivates me to open up Unity even after a hard day’s work at the end of the day.

There are a lot of features that I would change today looking back at it. But I don’t regret it one bit. I strongly encourage anyone who has doubts about being able to make a game to give a shot at an experience like this. To make a game from start to finish, even if that means cutting out on quality, polish, gameplay or such. It’s an enriching experience and goes a long way in giving confidence to keep going afterwards.