About

Welcome To the Cider Mill!

Apple picking, hot cider, pumpkin spice, and the changing colors of leaves – all these quintessential aspects of autumn filled my cozy spirits to the brim this past spooky season, and I couldn’t help but become inspired to launch my long awaited passion project – learning indie game development!

In my first post here at the Cider Mill, I want to share with you who I am, whyI am learning game development, and who may benefit from reading this blog.

Who am I?

Hello! My name is Wady, I’m a 24 year old grad student born and raised in Upstate New York. I’m a proud husband, brother, son, and dog/cat dad. I also really love to play narrative-driven videogames, travel with my wife, and cook yummy stuff.

Why am I learning game development?

All my life, I’ve wanted to tell stories that touch people at their core. What really ‘lights my fire,’ so to speak, is when story telling combines with great world building to have a profound, lasting impact on one’s soul. Intriguing, endlessly detailed fantasy settings like George Lucas’ Star Wars, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and Team Cherry’s Hallownest are a few examples that have impacted me in this way. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to take inspiration from the nostalgia, depth, and hair-raising narrative of these worlds and attempt to build a unique world of my own to share with others.

I’m choosing videogames as a platform to build these worlds because of the unique variety of artforms available to express oneself through a videogame. As a solo indie game developer (someone who makes an entire game single-handedly), one expresses their world through a combination of visual art, music, and storytelling – and then turns these different media into a single interactable experience via code and programming.

For these reasons, I believe that the most immersible way that I could possibly tell a compelling story is through – you guessed it – a videogame.

Who is this blog for?

This blog is meant to thoroughly document the journey of a complete beginner (me) pursuing a far-fetched pipe dream of becoming a great indie videogame developer in order to tell tear-jerking stories. In doing so, I will split this blog into five different topics, each topic represents a skill (or two) that I will attempt to acquire in order to build videogames from absolute scratch:

Visual Art Skills
Pixel Art + Animation
Music Composition and Sound Design
World Building + Storytelling
Unity and C# Coding

This blog may be enjoyed by anyone with an interest in any of the above topics, but is especially meant for those who 1) lack one or more of these skills, 2) want to improve said skills, and 3) are looking for a smidge of inspiration and confidence to help ignite your creative fire.

I want to be absolutely transparent about this: I’m currently a complete beginner at each of these skills. At the moment, I couldn’t draw a human face with proper proportions even if my life depended on it. I have never composed a piece of music, I’ve never coded a computer program, and I’ve never considered myself a writer by any means. I’m at a place you might call “point blank” in terms of indie game development.

Now you might be thinking: “How could anyone possibly make an indie game if they know literally nothing about art, music, and computer programming?”

Maybe you’ve been telling yourself “I don’t think I could ever become a great indie game developer (and/or visual artist, musical composer, writer of high fantasy epics, engineer of arcane lore, creator of beautiful worlds, etc…) because I don’t have the skillset required.”

Maybe you have a job, or you’re a university student, and want to pursue a passion such as art or game design, but you don’t because you don’t have enough time to learn the necessary skills – so you tell yourself “why even bother?”

If you can relate to any of these hindering thoughts or feelings, then I believe you’ll benefit from joining me for a cup of bubbly hot apple cider here at the Cider Mill.

Yes, I’m currently a complete beginner, as are many of you – but this article is but a mere snapshot in time! Soon, this article will be one year, two years, someday ten years old. As time marches on, my hope is for my skillset to improve significantly, and that this article serves as antiquated proof that anyone can achieve anything. As someone wise once said, “progress is slow but without long breaks”.

If nothing else is accomplished here on this blog, my only hope would be to convince someone out there that it’s possible to pick a dream (any dream), stick with it, and ultimately realize it – regardless of your past, regardless of your present situation, and regardless of your skillset (or lack of thereof).

For me, that dream is to gradually acquire each skill required to craft a truly beautiful, narrativeCider Mill Studio-driven videogame that will evoke the same throb in the hearts of others that Tolkien, Lucas, Lovecraft, Team Cherry, and countless other brilliant creators have evoked in mine.

In Conclusion,

Life may often be a box of chocolates, but not today folks. Today, and each day henceforth at the Cider Mill, life is a mug full of freshly-pressed hot apple cider. Today is the day we join together and raise our mugs in solidarity to resurrected dreams of times past, and say “yes, it may be a bit of a lofty goal, but it is possible, and yes, we can do it.”

Starting this week, I will do my best to make one post per week, each post covering a subtopic of one of the five main topics listed above in the previous section. Behind the scenes, I’ll be continuously working on my main project (which I have yet to announce). As I continue to work on this project, I’ll release updates regarding its progress, and incorporate that progress into most of my posts.

I’ll leave you with a quote from a particularly inspiring movie which my wife introduced me to a few months ago.

“All the silliest things in life are done with a ‘clever’ look on one’s face… So smile, gentlemen, smile!”

– Baron Munchhausen

Cheers to our dreams,

Wady