briangray

I've been working on similar productive things (i.e. reading, jogging, projects), to keep out the 'what-ifs'. One of those projects I intend to start soon is building a small game. I've come across a lot of discussion about engines, frameworks, and hand-built options. A large majority push for larger engines like Unity or Godot that 'do it all' to focus more on the game and less on what's needed to build it. That seems alright, but being a backend dev, I generally enjoy understanding the full operation and building it out as close to my needs as possible.

What have you used for your smaller games? And what would you recommend for someone with programming experience, but lacking experience in pretty much every other facet of game development?

I had a blog I ran for a while showcasing my tech projects. The main page was titled 'Failures' and it held all the attempted projects I had. Some reaching a successful deployment and the final version being posted in 'Successes'. The idea started entirely from seeing so many other blogs and social media posts with these beautifully presented codebases or finely crafted hardware. They showed the picture perfect view of those projects, but not how they got there. I wanted to do the opposite so people could actually see the faults I ran into and hopefully learn from them.

I had a lot of fun with it and learned a lot as well. There were several older projects I posted the failures of that people contacted me about to help or point out what I did wrong. Some became successes! Eventually though, I had a kid and stopped posting. The final Failure ended up being a post about the blog and a loop back to the failures section before the domain expired. I'll rebuild it someday, but I wish that kind of thing was more prominent.

I do not have a LinkedIn profile because I've run into issue with doxxing in the past. Limiting the availability of my personal information online has always seemed like a safer bet. However, after reading through a lot of comments, there does seem to be a good amount of support for LinkedIn.

Aside from the social spam and fake recruiter pestering, can anyone speak to the value of it? There are several comments referring to multiple jobs they've received because of it. Though I have a good job now, it seems more and more that you need an online presence to land programming jobs. I'm trying to gauge whether delving into that is worth the risk of making the information available again.