Prototyping & Learning PORTFOLIO-BLOG

It was early February 2021 when I decided to finally give it a shot and learn something new. 

Back then I didn't know much about what was coming. 

Godot Game Engine was my first choice. It seemed relatively small comparing to Unity and Unreal, at therefore easier to tame.

A month later an idea for Diamond Hands Arena was born and I began the development. 

It's huge!

After watching countless promo videos and taking the first official pathway, I knew I was hooked. 

Yes, the software itself probably has pros and cons, but getting to know it seems like a must in modern game dev. 

This is how I came to realisation I want a good guide and decided to enroll a paid course. 

GameDev.TV was my choice. Wanna try it yourself? Go ahead.

Unity3D - here I come! 

https://www.gamedev.tv/courses/1111834?coupon_code=SUMMER

A lot of great stuff happened in October. I had some great experiences related to game dev and programming in general, some job interviews, some conceptual meetings, too.
Then an opportunity came to join a bigger team, where I could learn a lot, but it would also take some preparation.
In order to do that, I had been suggested it's time to really improve my pure programming skillset, and that requires maybe a little less Unity, a little more coding, including command line apps. 

The opportunity looks promising, so I dedided to give it a go. Let's see how it goes.

Thanks to the C sharp academy , I extended my pure C# skills and at the same time did not have to totally abandon game dev - as this first app is in fact a math game!

Not much, but it's honest work.
https://github.com/MPLekter/CSharpAcademy-Math-game
Using Json files, Helper classes, figuring out 3 methods of File writing and saving until I had what I desired. All in all, that was fun!

Thanks to some personal friend of mine, I  am enjoying the opportunity of having a real big time  programming senior as my part time mentor right now!
The language and environment of choice is Ruby on Rails.

Unfortunately due to the nature of our cooperation I cannot disclose any details, but I am happy as usual when working with software.
I have to say, convention over configuration is great!

An interesting FB group post charmed me and I decided to help an artist build his dream game.
After a couple of weeks of hellishly fast cooperation, I finished my prototype :)
https://github.com/MPLekter/Godot-Platformer2D-Project

Unfortunately, the project owner lagged with his part of the work and after numerous tries to keep the pace, I gave up to pursue other opportunities...

Implemented mechanics: State machine, screen shake, polished controller

Becoming a father, I realised I am going to need a steady income again, so I came back to my full-time job in PM.

How else to put it, a mixture of happiness and disappointment. I wasn't able to make it as hobbyist game dev, but I sure had fun.

And hey, life is far from over, let's see what the future brings...

Wow, just wow.

Just hours after starting a full-time job again, I got hired to remake my Froggo 2D into a 3D project.
The Company has some infamy to it, but opportunity cost is not so big to me (I am going to work on my own terms, in Unity, and probably get paid for that  - sounds pretty good)

So this is what I am planning to do. Goal is ambitious - I only have a couple of months to finish that.

I have been off for a loooong time and haven't even checked on this site. Occassional messages via reddit kept me connected to whoever was interested in cooperation.
I refused all of them as I was pretty busy with my PM job.
After a little while in 2023,  I became a father. Needless to say, it's a mind-bending miracle of an event. Endless joy since then.
But hey, this is not exactly what this portfolio blog is about, even though I felt a big urge to share it.

Most importantly in my programming/game dev area, I worked a little closer with corporate, embedded electronics programmers and had a chance to see what kind of complexity (and constraints) you can expect when working for a really big international company.

In the meantime, I received inquiries if I could do a little help maintaining a Wordpress website that had a major crash and lost a lot of data. Never had I any experience in it, but still decided to give it a go using WayBackMachine. Then I got a little interested on what's going on under the hood there, looked into FTP/SQL. After a couple of months I was offered a job doing easy admin and copywriting stuff, along with backups, some design and graphics and so on. It's a tourism-related company run by friends of mine which must have helped. I gained a lot of necessary experience and it was not surprising when I was asked to test a couple of applications, outsourced to students and freelancers. Order management web apps, running in conjunction with wordpress. There were a couple of clever ideas there but finally the company decided to go with Google sheets + AppScrip + brilliant extensions, SheetGo and YAMM.

Now we are slowly parting ways and I am actively looking into embarking on a new journey... stay tuned for the next post!