♪ And you may ask yourself, how did I get here? ♪
Growing up playing RTS games in the late 90s / early 00s crafted my early gaming experiences in a profound way. With the resurgence in popularity of Age of Empires with the HD and Definitive editions receiving official publication and support from Microsoft, my friends and I have been playing them more than ever — although truth be told we never really stopped.
While playing a casual game of AoE2 with a friend recently we were having one of those pie-in-the-sky chats about what features or game modes would be fun to add. The kind of conversation you have when you’re a kid making up rules about the homebrew action figure arena battle ‘game’ you’re about to play. But this was different. I recently picked up a working knowledge of the Godot game engine, an open source alternative to the popular Unity game development platform.
…the stars are in complete alignment and unanimous in their assertion that this must be done, and I have been chosen as the avatar of their collective will.
Modern quality of life features and better internet speeds and networking make the Real Time Strategy player experience better than ever, and with free and open source game making software readily available and getting better all the time it feels like the stars are in complete alignment and unanimous in their assertion that this must be done, and I have been chosen as the avatar of their collective will.
So be it.
I’m the kind of person who will drift around like an un-tethered hot air balloon in between projects. Completely at the mercy of the day to day currents of my train of thought. But when inspiration strikes, I transform into a laser guided missile. Everything else fades away as I home in on that vision of a completed product. The machinery of life in the 21st century becomes a distraction, dust in the margins of my all consuming purpose:
The Project.
Obviously this isn’t a normal person’s work style, and I’ve got a love hate relationship with my intensity at times, but over the years I’ve come to embrace it. A mark of considerable success these days is harnessing the crackling raw power and hammering it into something useful and directable.
This is one of those projects.
