From App to Game Development

My life has taken some interesting turns over the past few years and it's now time for me to revive this blog, reflect over my new areas of interests when wearing the coder hat and break the radio silence.

tl;dr I'm going "back to my roots" to focus on indie game development. My modern platforms of choice are iOS and tvOS. I'm coding in Swift.

All work, no play

I originally created this blog years ago under a different site name and domain to post about my web related development and contributions to popular web frameworks.

That led me on a journey and career change starting with CodeIgniter and WordPress to finally dive deep into Laravel, Angular, Vue.js and Node.js, building web applications for clients over the last few years. I've been quite busy and have not had much time to explore my own coding projects or post new content to this blog.

No harm in that, as I've evolved a lot as a programmer during this time. All work and no play has it's own share of benefits, in my case it has made me a way better coder than I ever was before. I'm now better structured, more up to date with a vast array of technologies and I am way more comfortable to use all the common design patterns, testing techniques and other improvements to guarantee an efficient and stable codebase.

Another major benefit is that a few years of paid contract work combined with that I moved my life from Europe to Asia during this time, has given me a position where I now can afford to set aside the next year or two for exploring ideas without having to worry too much about getting a regular paycheck.

I'll use this opportunity to kind of return to my roots¹ and explore game programming for the coming years. I'll target iOS and tvOS and I have during the autumn of 2017 spent a lot of time to get up to date with the programming language Swift.

Coming Next

What's next for this blog? Well, keep reading if you're interested to follow along my life as an indie Swift game developer.

I will continuously post about my progress and related topics that comes along. That will include code, design solutions, progress reports, publishing process and other things as they happens.

Initially I'll be creating quite a simple game. Most likely a shmup², as that's something I can take from start to finish within a reasonable amount of time, while it will give me some real experience implementing all common gameplay logic and elements, get more comfortable with SpriteKit and GamePlayKit and also go through the App Store release process. I expect this initial project to take a few months and the articles I'll publish moving forward will follow that progress.

References

Rioter of Equinox. Coder in the Amiga demo scene group Equinox. ↩
Shoot 'em up. A subgenre of shooter action games. ↩