Intro…
This the development home of Dave. He is a man of a variety of talents though he would tell you he is master of few. This website has been in his back pocket (webaphorically speaking) for many years and various projects were stored here only to be removed shortly thereafter. So this website remained unused and derelict with scarcely even a website front page to keep the URL domain there. So now, after a few years, Dave has finally decided what to do with this site – use it to keep up to date with his attempts at writing video games!
What?
Dave has always been interested in writing stories in various capacities. During his teens and early 20s, he and his friends were avid tabletop role player with planned gaming sessions happening multiple times a week with different game masters (GMs). Dave wrote many great games that he attempted to run on many different tabletop systems including BESM, SAW, and Sphere. But alas, as his gaming group began to move on with their lives, many of this stories remained in his head or half completed.
After spending some time pursuing other interests, Dave decided to pick up some programming languages to help with designing games so that he could try to bring his ideas to life. He first attempted to learn Twine which he thought was neat, but was so highly specialized that making his ideas come to life. He still has a few stories available in this language but they are not updated anymore.
Next, Dave spent some time learning how to use the Unity engine for a 2D dungeon crawling game he jokingly named “Try Not to Die” because of the ridiculous level of difficulty it presented to the player. The game was almost completed but Dave was not happy with this product because there were no graphics in the game aside from rough ASCII images likened to MUDs from the early 1990s. He wanted something else to try.
After doing some research, Dave decided that he wanted to become familiar with the Ren’Py engine since it already uses Python, a common language that Dave has at least a rudimentary grasp of, and it allowed him to design systems in the Visual Novel Style which he is quite fond of. So Dave has begun the quest to teach himself Ren’Py so that he can one day transport “Try Not to Die” into a more modern and graphically appealing format.
Why?
The answer to this is quite simple, because Dave has many stories he wants to share with the world. These stories may be short games that appeal to the casual gamer who just wants to do some shiny things and have some interesting stories. These stories may also be dungeon-crawlers of varying genres including his remixed game (See “Try Not to Die”) and other variations of it. For a magnum opus, however, Dave hopes to rebuild some of the game worlds from his tabletop days into fully fledged games that the diehard gamer can enjoy without needing a console system.
When?
Now THIS is the hard question. Dave has a lot going on. He is already an IT Manager for a very well known Unified Communications company which is rather demanding. Not only that, but he is also an online teacher for a major university and is often trying to juggle teaching with his day job. He also has a rather absurd amount of children (5 if you didn’t know) and they require considerable time and care. But the fact remains that Dave wants to do this and if you keep an eye on this site, you will see updates when they are available.
Where?
The best way to keep up with the work Dave is doing is to keep an eye on his GitHub, that is where he will be storing most of his data.