So it begins...

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2026-09-04

I honestly never thought of making a blog, and yet here we are, life does take weird turns.

Anyway, I've been a programmer for a while now, not so much of that time making videogames.

Nothing special, no AAA title (or any recognizable title really), mini advergames, some experiments, some failed attempts to be an indie developer…

And this is precisely yet another attempt, except that this time I'll, for many reasons, choose a path that many could consider as an unnecessarily difficult one.

I'll do it alone, I don't have the money to pay a dignified salary to someone else.

Any personal project that I develop will be free, I'll bet on any donations from people who like what I do (I'll obviously still charge for commissioned projects).

Also, and this is the most terrifying part for me, my personal projects will be made without a game engine, for anyone who wants to know, I'll use Odin and SDL (again, this won't apply to commissioned projects, unless, I guess, the client specifically requests otherwise)

Which leads me to my first project, which will be called Weak Wizard for now. I won't give any details right now, but it's an idea that I've been analyzing and refining for a while now and therefore I have a very clear work plan.

For now, the first step: To start.

Yeah, I know, it doesn't seem very impressive, but it's surprising the amount of work that implies to create the foundation of a game: initialize a window, create a loop and some functions that draw a text (right now the game has no graphic identity so the title will simply be a text).

However, I'm already starting to see the advantages of doing things this way:

• The simplicity of it all: I don't need to create a big file to create a scene, just a few switches here and there and everything's set.
• Now that I'm writing the code by myself it becomes evident the amount of stuff that game engines previously load when they have to load a simple screen with a text: classes, resources, initializations, and a bunch of data; and in the end almost none of it gets used; yes, I know, all of that stuff speeds up development, but the player is the one that ends up paying the price.

Ok, they aren't exactly advantages for me (creating the base game will take a lot of work), but they will be for those who eventually play Weak Wizard, it obviously won't have AAA worthy graphics, but it will have a lot of complexity and I want that memory and processing time to be exclusively dedicated to the game and not to a bunch of wrapping and stuff that I won't take advantage of anyway.