Having meant to start this journal for a month now, it’s a bit of a relief to finally be typing.

Video games have always fascinated me. Having dealt with severe Asthma attacks as a kid, my parents were at a loss for how to keep me safe without the residual boredom of a life indoors. I don’t remember if it was our doctor’s recommendation or my becoming obsessed with penciling bomb locations on a printed out Zelda map with the babysitter’s kids, but we eventually wound up with a console at home that I very much obsessed over. The original Zelda, Mario 3, Donkey Kong, Melee, WoW, PoE — the times and technology have changed, but the medium itself continues to grab us.

After undergrad, I excitedly downloaded the Unity engine. To my surprise, those same bright eyes that were so excited to finally join that world were shuttered at how foreign that world truly was. Programming, physics, architecture, animation, sprite work, UI, sound design — “you need to know all of this?” It produced the same tinge of fear I’d felt when discussing Melee with someone, only to suddenly process the chasm between our abilities. I couldn’t believe it.

That experience bothered me quite a bit. Since then, I’ve worked with Unity for work and leisure, but never moved beyond the tech demo stage for those side projects. These have generally been fun and educational, but you lose the medium’s power: handing it to someone and letting them experience your work firsthand.

To that end, I decided to finish a game by Christmas 2020.

Despite making a similar resolution last year, time and scope both proved fatal as neither the game’s requirements nor its end-state were fleshed out in any capacity. This ended up being quite a gut punch, but it plainly emphasized the importance of having a plan and taking something seriously enough to work through your own reluctance.

So, over the next 6 months, this journal will outline the thinking and decisions that result in either a finished game or another pacing disaster by Christmas 2020. While the direct outcome will be a set of developer logs covering the system design, modeling, scripting, and outcomes in an isolated and spoiler-free setting, it’s also serving as an indirect motivation as December approaches.

The project is tentatively called DIVE.