Hello, my name is Brandon and I am a Senior Software Engineer/Architect. By day I do event driven programming in Golang. I am mostly a professional programmer, and usually don't finish many personal projects. I hope to change that.
My 30+ year software engineering journey
I started to learn programming at the age of 14. Way back in the 90s. I wanted to learn how to program for one reason only.
TO MAKE GAMES
I ended up not being a game dev. After a really rough start in my career in the early 2000s, I pivoted to Java programming and production support at banks and financial service companies. Then I moved into the telecoim realm. And I have worked on and built many many large skill systems.
I'm not the best in the world but I think I know my domain of programming pretty well. And I've always wanted to do personal projects but I just procrastinate or never stick with it. This year I plan to change that.
September 13, 2025: The journey begins
Ok, ok. So today technically is September 14th, but yesterday I just did planning and design. Today I put some hands on keyboard. So it's my first day actually making my game idea tangible.
Why is September 13th so important? Well its my birthday. I won't go into my personal life, but 2025 has been a year of reflection. And it has not been the smoothest year. Quite the opposite. I've been doing some major soul searching.
I turned 46. I'm seeing the threat of AI on my profession. And if our AI overlord take us over, it will be humans leaning into creativity who will move forward. So that's what I'm doing. I'm being an artist. Reverting to my 14 year-old self, and rediscovering my passion for game programming.
Yeah I love gaming, but I'm not a game developer
I've been interested in Zig for a few years. And I've always had an interest in game dev. So here we are. Learning both in this year. My MVP is to have the first stage done.
So the goal is to learn game development and Zig all within this year. It will be a fun journey I think.
So how is it going so far?
Well I've been using Google Gemini AI as a bit of a sounding board. Its been helping me fill in some of the gaps of my game development. But I gave it explicit instructions not to write any code for me. Just to kind of go over different concepts and ideas with me. Its been going well. I call him "Lil Homie Jimmy".
At first I wanted to use the Mach Enginehttps://machengine.org/. But it uses Zig nightly builds and nominates a build. It's also locked into the ECS pattern, which is probably not a horrible thing for what I'm going to be doing. But I think the Zig build nomination makes my workflow so cumbersome, especially since its only on Zig 0.14. It makes more sense to be on 0.15 and it also doesn't break my toolchain (like ZLS).
So I decided on Raylib. It has a lot of examples in many many languages. So its a great choice for someone who is a novice game dev.
This is what I have so far. It took all day to do this. So not the best start. But this square will serve as a hitbox for my eventual character. This will be a 2D game and an action platformer, so collision detection will make a huge difference here.
What is the game idea?
Its going to be a 2D action platformer. That's all I can say now. And I want to put a big emphasis on boss battles. I think there is a good idea here, but I kind of want to see it to completion before I say too much.
So how are we going to move forward?
Well tomorrow I want to start doing some stuff with the user input. This shouldn't take too long to complete. But it will probably introduce me to some stuff like vector geometry. That's my goal for tomorrow.
Conclusion
If all goes well, this time next year will be my #365th entry. My issues is sticking with stuff, so this is a habit I'm going to hav eto try to break this year.
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