My first attempts at making a video game started when I was about 8 years old. I had a Commodore 64 and quickly developed a talent for making it go. Now I didn’t have the internet, or even a lot of books on programming, but I did have one book that covered enough of the Basic language for me get started.

Suffice it to say, I did not write the next hit video game, but I made a few demo level games that were enough for me at the time. Recently, well several years ago I got an inexplicable urge to make a video game. I tried pygames, a game library for python, and got little further than I did when I was young, a spaceship dodging asteroids as long as you could for a high score. I lost interest as quickly as I had gained it and never did do much with it.

Maybe the problem is that I am not a gamer, haha. Sure I played some arcade games when I was younger, but to answer the question how many hours a month do I spend gaming, zero. In a year I play about the same amount. Then I might goof around with something like Civilization, or a Commodore 64 emulator, even an occasional web game of the puzzle solving variety. But that will last a month or two, then another 5 or 6 years without a single game played. So why would I want to make one?

In the past it has been mostly just to see if I could. Once I get it to a basic playable point, I lose interest. I didn’t invest any real creativity into it. If I’m not being creative, I am probably bored. So I found a game that I made in Pygames about six months ago and started thinking about ways to actually make it good. Then it got fun and I became obsessed. I started thinking of different ways to make a simple concept into a dynamic and engrossing gaming experience and I realized I can go all out on it. The more creative the better. All of a sudden I was developing characters, weapons, ships, enemy droids, back stories, graphics, strategies and am currently loving it.

So the first game in this video game section is the first game I have attempted to make actually stand out as a game someone would get hooked on. The name of the game is Space Smuggler Blooze and it is an ambitious project that I have already put hundreds of hours into and will have to put many hundreds of hours in to finish it.

Actually, I did start to embrace the idea of getting creative and having fun with some class projects that were basic games in an online python course I was taking. So before we dive into Space Smuggler Blooze let’s take a peek at those little gems.