Fun Game devlog - how it started

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a game dev.

I started the year freshly unemployed, disillusioned with being a job haver, and wanting to commit to just doing personal projects and "being an artist". The main project was "minimum viable framework", an application development framework made up of libraries and utilities written in C, and intended for use in all of my other software dev projects.

Unfortunately, I had experienced quite a number of inexplicable technical difficulties. My main laptop corrupted itself in such a way that I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I tried to copy the data over to my thinkpad t420 but it literally exploded when I turned it on. My desktop computer's graphics card died shortly after. I tinkered with the first laptop until I got that working again but the hard drive ended up failing after a while. I then put an nvme drive from my desktop computer into that laptop and that worked for a few weeks but the charging port stopped working.

These are just some of the weird technical problems I had to deal with. Each time was a bit of a setback and it made it really difficult to continue.

It took until around July for me to finally get to a point where I was able to sit down and weigh my options. All I had left to work with was my really old thinkpad x230 from 2012, which doesn't support the modern graphics features my minimum viable engine/framework requires. I'm stable enough financially to do this for a little while but not too long, and I've tried walking away from this stuff many times before and always ended up coming back. I thought more about the situation and came up with a plan...

My 30th birthday will be at the end of February next year, which at the time I came up with this stuff gave me about 7 months to work with. I chose to go with a simplistic art style that also allows me to kitbash together stuff from itch.io. I chose to rework some of the ideas, systems and tooling from my minimum viable framework and just use raylib and its associated utilities for stuff like rendering, platform layer, gui, loading stuff from disk, etc. That comes with a lot of disadvantages but saves me a lot of time and effort, and that's about as much 'compromise' as I can stomach anyway. So here's the idea I came up with:

It's a grand theft auto style 3D open world game where the map is based off of where I grew up. You play as a 29 year old game developer who has to "make it" before he turns 30. You have to eat food, pay bills, and figure out how to survive. Some of the fun things I'd like to include are fighting mechanics, ziplines, climbing, parkour/platforming, vehicles, skateboarding, roller blading, police that chase you around with tazers, and fun interactions with NPCs.

Next devlog I'll show off the editor and how cool it is. The plan is to update here periodically if I have cool stuff to show off until hopefully it resembles a fun game in some way by the end of February :^)