Let’s Learn To Make Games 1: My Blogging Goals
A little bit about me:
Hi, I’m Matt. I am not a coder, nor am I an artist. I make beats and DJ and have released several albums, have toured all over the USA and Europe and I teach people how to make music for a living but I don’t know jack-ola about making games. I am a game development newb. This is my quest.
As I’ve entered my thirties, had two sons and settled down a bit I am looking to do something more challenging that engages different parts of my brain. I love to write, think and design systems. This passion is what brought me to want to design games, along with my enjoyment of playing them (obviously!). I am also very interested in the idea of creating a small, digital business that will allow me the freedom to work on creative projects and earn the income I need to support my family without having to work for someone else or divide my time between my self expression projects and my money earning projects as I now have to with my music career (producing and teaching). I hope that by making games I’ll be able to do something interesting and creative all the time and make a reasonable living from it.
With this blog I am hoping to do a few things:
1. Help People. I want to provide a resource for people like me who are starting out, know nothing but are passionate about creating interesting game experiences.
2. Make Friends. I want to gather together a community of people like me, hopefully collaborate with some like minded people and generally not feel like I’m totally alone in the cold dark internets.
3. Earn Money. I am hoping that if I provide enough valuable information for people through this site that I will be able to earn a little bit of money doing it, bringing me closer to my goal of creative self-reliance and allowing me to focus more on my passion. My plan at the moment is to try to include some advertisements and affiliate links to the resources and products I use in my journey so that if anyone else wants to use them I can earn a small commission at no extra cost to them. I believe honesty and transparency are the best possible business approach and so any affiliate offers will always be clearly labelled. My plan is to only promote affiliate links to resources which I am using and can wholeheartedly recommend. I really want to be a trustworthy voice and so will never promote anything that I think is crappy.
4. Market. Build interest in my game projects for when they are ready to release. Hopefully by the time I am done with my first game and ready to sell it there will be a few people who have followed it’s progress on this site and are interested in playing it.
5. Demonstrate a model. I think this blogging/game making model works well for small developers and other people who make things. I want to show that it can work for a total newb like me too and hopefully show people how to do it as I go. As a result I will try to mix in some blogging/marketing talk with the game development stuff along the way.
Reading this it may seem like a reasonable plan. The funny part is how little I actually know about making games and how sucky I am at the moment. This would probably be a good time to post a youtube video of me yelling at my computer as Unity gives me compile errors over missing semi-colons just so you all can get a feeling of how far I have to go.
Is this a good idea? Am I just another dumb newb being wrong in the internets? Did I just stumble across THE ULTIMATE PLAN FOR TOTAL GAME DEVELOPMENT DOMINATION?!?!?! Let me know via the comments.