Greetings I'm Scott and I have been a Full-Stack developer for the last few years. Game development and design has been a passion of mine since the SNES stole my heart in the 90’s.

I built this site to help me become a developer and work towards being a full-time game developer. Making a website would be both good experience and a great spring board for projects. I wanted a platform to share my ongoing development of projects and my research into game development, the Unity engine, and anything else I think might belong out in the wide world.

The last two years were particularly trying year for everyone...everywhere. There was a lot of tragedy, fear, and not a small amount of anxiety over COVID-19. I was luckier than most and my time in isolation from the virus was punctuated by long stretches idleness.

With ample time on my hands, I pieced together this website, chronicling my latest escapade into the realm of game development. I don't have a set schedule for releasing articles or publishing projects. There are still things There's still room for improvement on IkhanGames.com: SEO tweaks, view counters, and a major facelift for the admin interface (trust me, it's not ready for its close-up). I also have a lot to learn about operating a website. I need to give a special thanks to Matt Doyle and his wonderful Build a CMS in an Afternoon with PHP and MySQL guides which were very easy to follow and operate.

As to why I want to become a video game developer. Games are great. They're a very pure creative endeavour that can also draw out the creativity of gamers through their designs. It is part of a powerful and continually growing industry populated by impassioned experts and enthusiastic novices alike. It’s possible to build games solo to great effect or contribute to massive game projects as part of a cooperative like The Glory Society, or in a development company.

This isn't my first attempt to be a game developer. In 2003 I tried my hand with RPGMaker2000

but my eyes where bigger than my belly, so to speak. I was planning an Opus that would have been ambitious for an industry veteran let alone a novice who hadn't even learned the user interface. That particular summer project flamed out unspectacularly.

My forays into C++ and GameMaker Studio programming went much the same way. An insane scope that; realistically, in hindsight my experience couldn't produce. If you can see a motif forming in my game dev history then rest easy. I have rectified the issue; the brain transplant was a complete success.

I took classes on more fundamental concepts and started treating game programming as a speciality of programming; the same with the design and engineering sides. To even dip my toe in game dev I needed everything else. Explore game dev at a learning pace rather than a goal oriented pace. No more piecemeal lessons trying to solve only the problem in front of me. Not that there is anything wrong with learning trough trial an error. The issue was my lack of a foundation. Any lessons I learned having lacked any context making it more difficult to use it in the future.

I needed a proper plan as opposed to the pie in the sky plans I operated in the past; smaller more conservative goals and benchmarks. Taking on achievable baby steps and picking projects that I can actually finish. That was a big hold up coming off my previous attempts. I might not have dropped RPGMaker or GameMaker Studio if I had produced games of any quality I'd want to put my name on.

One of those steps…this site. Beyond being a place to log my progress, will be where I post information, notes, technical reviews, and idle musings.

I hope my journey; where ever it leads, is helpful to others. I hope everyone has a happy and healthy 2024.