An Origin Story...

It began with a devastating injury a little over 2 years ago. When the nurse told me I was going to be off my feet for at least three months, I decided to look on the bright side: I've always wanted to learn how to make video games, but I've never been good at sitting down to do the learning required. I had dabbled with Unreal Blueprints and gotten nowhere. I had fared a little better with Unity, but never quite made it stick.

Now that sitting down was my only option, I decided to take my mind off the fact that my footballing days were over by taking a couple of online courses to learn Unity & Blender.

By the time I was able to go back to work, I was good enough at Unity to put simple prototypes together. I needed a project to work on, so I came up with a survival horror set in a museum, with lots of priceless artifacts to get broken in the crossfire. But then I realised I didn't want my first game to be something my little boy would not be able to play, so out went the monsters and the gore, and in came these Naughty Teddies from another universe. Out went the career thief with a gun to shoot, and in came a kid with cuddles to give. The museum full of fragile treasures was welcome to stay.

In early 2019, I had a janky prototype of the game in Unity which I was reasonably happy with, though the project was a mess and needed a major refactor. About the same time, Godot 3.1 was released to great fanfare ("the 3D engine is actually kinda okay now", fans shouted from the rooftops), and I liked the idea of an Open Source, Linux-as-a-first-class-citizen game engine, so I decided to follow my heart and learn Godot.

I soon fell in love with Godot, and eventually decided I knew enough to rewrite Naughty Teddies Invade the Museum as a Godot project.

There is still a lot of work to do on the game, but all of the basic mechanics are in, and I do maybe spend too much time playing it when I'm supposed to be working on it, but I'm hoping that's a good sign :)

It goes like this: You enter a museum vault, naughty teddies teleport in and set about trashing the artifacts, so you chase them down and cuddle them until they teleport back from whence they came.

So that's how it all began.

I plan to use this devlog to share a bit more about the game as I work on it, as well as sharing things I've learned along the way.