I’ve been watching that streamer “Pirate Software” lately. Very enthusiastic guy, passionate about game development. So I thought I’d set up a wee website where I can post silly games, just to try it out.
Obviously I’m not actually that clued up on coding, but I’ve made surprising progress using ChatGPT and having it create some acceptable games in JavaScript. It’s a fun wee project, and a really well needed distraction from the other troubles in my life. So far I’ve done Snake, Minesweeper, tried to do Pong, a six-letter Wordle, and working on getting a sort of Bejeweled clone on the go. Learning loads, and occasionally even having fun with it.
When I was a teenager I actually did attend a course at a polytechnic that was supposed to be focused on game development. Well, they decided before that course started that we’d be focused on just your standard software development instead so I ended up quite disillusioned by the whole thing. Ended up dropping out, and moving to Scotland. Something of a formative life experience, really!
Doing game development has also been an opportunity to learn more web development. Thinking I’ll set up my site with a CloudFlare thing, to reduce egress costs from my S3 bucket. That sounds really clever, doesn’t it? It’s what ChatGPT told me to do… I have a feeling lots of people who make use of the thing will end up with quite the case of “imposter syndrome!” Anyway, what that means in practice is I’ll have copies of my website cached at various locations, and don’t need to dip into the “bucket” so often and as these buckets that host my javascript games charge per download, it’s a no-brainer to set up such a cache apparatus. AWS offer a 1TB free tier for this and honestly I can’t imagine my wee games becoming popular enough that I’ll ever exceed that.