Meet me…
Hi,
I’m Gavin and welcome to my blog, Scary Blank Page. I want to use this space as a reflective journal, to chart and document my own journey and thoughts on a brand new venture: to create and build my own, independent game development studio.
My background is in engineering, mostly working in R&D. Graduating with a degree in electronics I soon converted to the dark side of software engineering and spent many years working on realtime, embedded systems. In the very early days I often needed to design the hardware and then write the software to make it work. Processors were much simpler back then I must admit. Nowadays I work in User-space delivering complex software solutions often employing a mixture of technologies.
I also ran my own business for almost 8-years as a Fashion and Commercial Photographer. It was an incredible experience and without doubt the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Very rewarding too. I was fortunate enough to be a Vogue featured photographer, my images were published around the world and I won a Best Business award at the Business Excellence Forum in 2014. Sadly, I had to close the business when I broke my left shoulder whilst on holiday. The resulting on-going injury made it impossible to lift the camera above shoulder height for over a year.
With the outbreak of COVID-19 in the UK and subsequently being furloughed I chose to use the opportunity to reinvent myself. I miss running my own business and with a keen interest in gaming and development I started to look at releasing my own games and ultimately starting a game studio of my own. During my research I stumbled across the MA course ‘Indie Game Development’ at Falmouth University. The course brief was a near perfect match for the new venture I was planning so I applied and the rest is history.
Why game development?
One of the first programs I ever wrote was a game: a Space Invaders clone on my friend’s ZX81. It wasn’t particularly good but it was a start. Text-based adventure games were also very popular at the time. They were easy to write and didn’t require sophisticated graphics making them easy to port to other platforms. I took inspiration from the works of Scott Adams and started to write my own adventures for my friends to play. I think I had just as much fun writing them as playing them, if not more.
It dawned on me that I kept writing the exact same code over and over again. Each adventure had very similar logic, the biggest difference being the data needed for the map, objects and locations. With that in mind I started to write my own language, AdvLan (short for Adventure Language). The idea was simple: to write a simple adventure game language that would load the game data and run the game. I wasn’t aware of this at the time but as I look back now I realise I’d inadvertently stumbled across what we now refer to as Data Driven Design and written my very first Game Engine, albeit a very crude one. This was the ’80s after all. There was no internet, no StackExchange and I was still at school studying for my A levels. Most homes didn’t have a computer back then and those that did didn’t have a floppy drive let alone a hard disk.
Technology evolved: the platform and graphics became ever more powerful, languages such as C++ came to the fore and APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX were released. As a solo developer it suddenly became feasible for me to delve back into game development but always struggled with the lack of a decent game engine. Writing one was a huge task! I still remember wrestling with DirectX to create a back buffer flipping chain, scene graphs and implementing a Continuous Level of Detail rendering system. I spent more time on the engine than the game play and ultimately each project I attempted failed.
Today, things are very different. The accessibility of engines such as Unreal and Unity have shifted the balance in favour of the game play.
The Future…
My goal now is to launch my own independent game studio as a vehicle for developing and releasing my own titles.
This blog, Scary Blank Page, is intended to serve as a living journal and repository of knowledge to chart and document my journey to achieve that goal.
Disclaimer
ScaryBlankPage.com is my personal blog and is being created as part of an accredited educational programme as I am a postgraduate student on the MA Indie Game Development course at Falmouth University. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are my own and not those of the University, its staff or students.