Hi, I am an engineer at Blue Origin currently working on manufacturing engineering for 3D printed copper rocket components. I made this blog to document my efforts moonlighting as a solo game developer. This blog mostly focuses on the development process and game design decisions I am making as I develop my games. All the code for my games is openly hosted on github, which can be reached by clicking on the github icon below.
Contact Info: samjudd [at] protonmail [dot] com
Build Link Download the latest Wellspring 3 build here. Build is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows 10. If you’re interested in providing feedback feel free to use this form to send back any comments, positive or negative. All feedback is greatly appreciated! Thanks! Build Notes At the moment there are no tutorials and the UI is pretty minimal. Controls are listed below for using the build. W: Move camera up....
So it’s been a while since I’ve last posted, but I’m finally back on the grind working on the game so I’m back with another update! When I left off about a month ago I had 2 main goals left to finish before I could get started on character design. Those (copy-pasted from my last post below) are now finaly done! Character attacking, attack range, and hitpoints, as well as making a target dummy....
Quick update for now, I was able to get character movement working last week, as well as cleaning up a lot of the code that I had to make the interface a little easier to use and expose the right things. From a couple weeks ago, I had left 5 goals for the next steps in the game. I did pretty well, and this update finishes off goals 1-3 and goal 5 listed below (from the end of last post)....
This is my first blog post for work I’m doing actually right now as opposed to catchup. Very exciting! I started out this week working on making a hex map for Wellspring3 in Godot. The great part about using Godot was that they already have a TileMap class ready-to-go for creating tilemaps. It enables you to create and save sets of tiles to use for the map as well as place, rotate, and access tiles via code....
The goal for this post is to kick off my development of Wellspring 3. Hopefully after this I’ll be posting regular, smaller updates as I develop the game. This will be a short one. At a certain point in Wellspring 2 prototyping, I realized I had a few issues with how the game was progressing and where it was headed. I thought that the game scope was getting too large for one person to develop, especially without a lot of experience....
The End of Wellspring 2 Although I quite like the idea for Wellspring 2, I ended up deciding to stop working on the project once I was ready to work on games again after a break. The main reason is that I think there is just too much scope for me to do on my own. I love the game idea and think it would be really fun to implement, but is too much for just me....
Now that I’ve talked about map design in the previous post, the next thing to get to is the character design. To establish the basics, each character has some amount of health (can vary between characters) that gets depleted as they take damage from enemy characters. When they reach 0, they are out of the game for some length of time before respawning in their own base. Each character is controlled to walk with WASD and look with the mouse....
From Wellspring 1 to Wellspring 2 Basically, I moved away from Wellspring 1 to another version to make the game development easier for myself. I am only one person, and I wanted to make something I could actually finish. One of the biggest changes I made was moving from Unity to the Godot Engine. Here’s why I did it: I like using it. The UI and organization make sense to me, or at least more sense than Unity....
I wrote this in 2017 in response to the “Damage Rating” statistic that got released at this link. This article no longer exists and unfortunately the link doesn’t work in the Wayback Machine either. Adding this anyway as I still think this has some interesting thoughts of mine on game development. It’s phrased as a letter to Riot, though i never ended up sending it, and is unedited from the time when it was written....
On the advice of my brother, I decided to start writing about my work developing a game by myself. So here goes. I started working on this a long time ago, so this work goes back in time to September-ish 2019. I have always enjoyed playing games (some would say too much) and after working in the aerospace industry for a few years I sorta decided that it is not really my life’s passion....