When I was 12 I started dreaming about becoming a game developer. I tried doing it on mobile but it was never feeling like some real game development. When I was 14, I finally got a computer. It was an old computer that was made in 2011. So, as you may have guessed, I could not even launch Unity or Unreal without it instantly crashing. It's when I was 16 and invested into upgrading its components that I finally could use it to play and make games.

So on Tuesday, ‎January ‎21, ‎2020, I opened Unity engine for the first time. At that point, I already knew what kind of game I wanted to make: a fan game of my three favorite games of that time. I wanted it to be a puzzle game mixing Minecraft, Bendy and the Ink Machine and Granny. The name that I had chosen for it was "Solve Da Riddle". I had extracted some models and textures from BATIM beforehand which I imported and placed in my first Unity project. I was already trying to create the game when I didn't know anything about how to use the engine. I have a screenshot of it which is why I know the exact date of when I started.

After that, I watched tutorials and tried my best to understand and follow along. While taking some steps back and thinking about my ideas for my first game, I decided that it would better to do my fangame only about one game. I don't really remember why I took that decision, maybe to make things less complicated or something. So I chose to make it a fangame of BATIM only instead. It was and still is my favorite game of the moment. Following that, my evenings and weekends (the only free times I had because of school) of the next weeks were spent extracting assets from BATIM. It was very long and boring with the technique I was using, also I was probably doing it in a dumb way. Since I had changed the game concept, I changed its name too. It became "Bendy and the Ink Machine: After the End", I know, not very original.

Overall, that's how I started making games. I then followed tutorials and kept making my fangame in a pretty untidy way. Like I said before, I didn't have much free time to spend on it. Mostly because of school and chores that I had to do. When the pandemic started, I got online school. It gave me a bit more free time which I entirely was dedicating to learning game development and making my own game. Because of my excitement and my ambitions, I was rushing things up. I was not realizing it but I was making my learning process inefficient. As a result, I was learning very slowly and I was writing bad code that I was not even understanding. I kept going that way for months. When the summer break came, I obviously got a lot more free time. So I invested it all into game development! Surprisingly, that led me to have a burnout. The first and only one I got of my life. I then spent way too many days doing nothing because I didn't feel like doing anything. After a while, it dissipated and I got back to game development.

I kept going that way until I moved to a different city, which is pretty far from where I used to live. Because the moving was sudden, I could not have all my things moved to my new place. I could only take the essentials and my computer was sadly not deemed essential. So I have been without my computer and most of my stuff for a bit more than three months. At least I had my cat lol. When I got all of my stuff back, it was no longer the summer. It's around this time that my game got its official name that we now know. What followed was an alternation between school and online school, which was again not leaving me much free time. When the holydays came, I got productive but on some other game projects that I decided to start. Through all the school year, in my free time, I tried my best to keep a balance between doing game development and taking breaks. At this point I was noticeably better at making games and learning things online. I was also not too bad in other fields like 3D modelling and audio editing, which I both started learning a couple months after I started learning game dev.

When the summer came, I had finally graduated from high school! But then, since I was getting closer to also become an adult, I had to get a job. That is what I did. When I got 18, it then allowed me to pay my rent, my food, my phone bills and all the other things. After working there for over two months, I got really sick of it and decided to quit. It was too physically and mentally painful. I am still living on the money I made at that job and as I said it before, I spend without any new income. I am a very anxious person and this makes it worse. I am trying to find a source of income by working from home while still having lot of free time to do game development but it is hard for some reasons. Since I left my work, I am spending my days either doing game dev, searching for a job, relaxing or sleeping. I haven't been much productive these times because of anxiety and the insomnia that it causes.

All that big text is to give you an insight of my journey into making this fangame and to guide you to have more appropriate expectations for when the game will get released. By that I mean that by knowing the big lines of how it all went down, you can better know what to expect. The most important to retain from all I said in that post is all that follows:

- I have been working on that game in solo

- At first it was rushed and made by a complete beginner

- I actually didn't have that much free time to make it because of school and chores

- I had setbacks such as a burnout an over three months without any access to my computer

- I worked at a full-time job for over two months which prevented me from getting any progress in my game dev

- I didn't spend all my free time just making that game but also making other games, learning how to use other softwares and even learning other artistic abilities

Please keep all that in mind for the release! On my part, I'm going to do my best to get the first chapter finished soon so that you can get to play it in the near future. As always, thanks for caring :)