Good Help is Hard to Find

I've spent the last 2 months trying to gather people to help me with the development of The Glow. As is expected when you begin with "can I pay you... in gum?" you'll get a few people interested in the project simply because they like the idea. Soon though, they realize you weren't kidding about the Trident Layers, and you never hear from them again.

Following the ol' adage, "If you want something done, do it yourself", I decided to dig into the code myself.

Now, let me give you a little information on my skillset. I had self-taught myself how to program in VB6. I later went on to flunk a college course in VB.Net.

No. Just... no.

Years later, I picked up the fascinating tool, GameMaker... not as cool as the title might suggest. I dug through the manual and became very familiar with the scripting language, and even got the program to do some pretty interesting stuff. Ultimately however, GameMaker is a kid's tool for building games like Pac-Man, or 1942.


Years passed yet again, and 4 years ago, we formed Pillar 4 Entertainment. For the most part, I stuck to Photoshop and MS Word. I did, however, peek into the code enough to lend a hand with the GUI of our game, Starfall: Frontier (2 years ago).

Other than that, my programming skills have remained somewhere in the neighborhood of being a mediocre html web designer.

But whatever! If no one is going to help me out with this, I apparently don't have any other choice. So I sat down at the keyboard, created a new Unity project and decided to start from nothing.

I have now managed to complete, in 12 hours, what I couldn't get 3 other programmers to finish in 2 months. My man, Quig, is now walking around, jumping, double-jumping, and I even have some very cool camera tricks thrown in there.

Really people? 2 months? And I was asleep for 4 of those hours! My fiance claims that it's because "I'm awesome". I still hold to the theory, however, that other people just really suck. I'm not sure which would be the more noble opinion...

I've spent the remainder of the day writing up a checklist for the game; really just covering the basic mechanics. I find myself being ever-so grateful that I chose to keep things simple.

But! It's a child-free weekend, I have my Juno Reactor station playing on Pandora, and my coffee pot just gurgled "I'm done. Come drink of me". It actually feels good to be making my own progress once again.