Life has been crazy recently, I graduated a few weeks ago, released a game, had to move to a temporary place, job hunting has been crazy and the “omg I need a job” anxiety is kicking in really hard, but anyway, this is not the place to talk about those things, this is the place to talk about game development!

Your Human is Sick!

During my Master’s in Game Design, I was part of the Serious Games Capstone, and I had to opportunity to develop a game that I pitched, created all the documentation, acted as director and programmer. And that now is on Steam!

Link on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1290510/Your_Human_is_Sick/

The game has its problems and I’m working on bug fixes and possible updates, but as of right now I’m really happy to have this game on Steam!

Now let’s talk about personal projects and what I’ve been up to!

LDJam 48

Participating in a Ludum Dare is something that I always wanted to do since… 2018? Or something like that, and this time, this year, this April, I decided that was it, I was going to make it!

And I made it, I finished a small turn-based game for Ludum Dare 48, called escars. You can play it on itch.io: https://gueepo.itch.io/escars

Sadly enough, I forgot to play other Ludum Dare games, which is sad, because the ~10 games I played were really interesting and entertaining, so because I didn’t play enough games, my game did not get an official rating, maybe next time!

Peanut Butter Engine

I’ve been talking about improving my C++ skills here for a long time, and that journey took me to sites like HackerRank, where I could practice algorithms and C++, and then it took me to Unreal Engine, which was a nice journey.

But getting deeper into that hole, I noticed that the next step, the next thing that would make me improve in C++ and further improve me on game development was… making my own engine.

I didn’t want to get into 3D, so I decided on making a 2D game engine to create tile-based games, and decided to call it Peanut Butter Engine! and I also wanted to make it open-source and a project that I will be working through the time!

Link to the Peanut Butter repository: https://github.com/guilhermepo2/PeanutButter

I am using a lot of references to make this engine, and they are all cited on the README.md on the repository, so feel free to take a look! Future plans and directions are also included there.

What comes next?

The biggest thing for me when answering this question, is to also answer the question: “What if I don’t get a job?” – If that happens it will mean I won’t have an income in the future and there is a lot of consequences on that. Anyway, here’s what’s currently on my mind:

• I’ve been dabbling on different ideas and prototypes to come up with games that can be commercialized and could potentially generate some revenue so I can sustain myself, maybe I will have something by next month?!
• I’ve been studying Multiplayer in Unreal Engine, and I would like to maybe come up with a prototype of a deathmatch third-person shooter, or anything simple but that can be a multiplayer game.
• As for Peanut Butter, I feel like I have a good framework set-up, I’m currently going through the book “Game Programming in C++” so I can learn a little bit more, after that I still have to do some work on the Sprites/Animations modules, because I currently don’t like how it works. And then I have to fix some dependencies using premake and start making games with it! The first one I want to make is Pong, and then maybe the remake of an old platformer of mine, happily(never)after.

That’s it for April and (a little bit of) May, I will see you next month and hopefully, I won’t be too late for next month! Now back to my Island in Animal Crossing!

Cheers!