I have been trying to figure out a way to go forward with this blog for a long time and I think I have finally figured it out. It seems obvious now but it took me a while to get here. I recently decided to study more game development theory which has produced a lot of inspiration for new features that I can add to Shoot A Bit. What I did not realize was at the time that I was building up a greater understanding of the decisions I was making while development games from an intuition standpoint. Every feature I put into a game has some impact of elements of game dev theory that I really did not know the names for. As I was reading “Reality is Broken” I realized that there is so much content on game dev theory that I can blog about and relate it directly to #ShootABit and all my other games too.

When I first started gaming I knew I wanted to make games which is why I ended up in the software development industry. However, I never decided to make them professionally. This lead to me making games in my free time, when the Android SDK was released I started publishing my first games. Since then I have been maintaining this blog and casually working on these games. So far, my blog has mainly been about the features I have been incorporating into my games but I felt there could be more.

The path I took to get to this conclusion was a meandering one. First I decided one day to start watching all the Extra Credits series on YouTube. This was extremely informative and bite sized. I then did a google search for “Best game dev theory audio books” since I walk to work and listen to audio books. I found this Reddit post which lead me to these resources.

From the Reddit I then listened to the “A Life Well Wasted”podcast which as of today seems to be only 7 episodes but the production quality and content is extremely good and inspiring.

Then finally, I bought “Reality is broken” by Jane McGonigal as an audio book. The theory content of this book seems endless. I am about half way through right now but seriously the content is good. So now I have a huge backlog of blogs I want to write and features I want to add to the games.

So here is the plan. I will try and take one theory concept I learn. Cite where I got the idea from, and then make a blog post that will drive the game development. The first one I have selected is a concept I got from Extra Credits. This idea is that games have 3 hooks that draw people in to play more “ Narrative, Mechanics, and Spectacle” My next blog will be on how #ShootABit relates to this concept and I will talk about one thing I can add that will hopefully make the game more interesting for it.

Thanks for reading. I will do my best to make this interesting and informative. Hope this blog will be a resource for other casual and indie developers out there. I love answering questions too. Leave a comment or ping me on twitter and I will try and get back to you.