One Foot In, A Step in an Unknown Direction
This marks the start of my journey. As far as actual projects or shipped projects go I have very little to present in that matter; that changes starting now.
To anyone unfamiliar with me and my work: Hello! I’m a (hopefully) burgeoning developer. At the time of writing I have an empty portfolio in the form of this site; I’m looking to change that.
My initial goal - at least at the time of writing - is to have a portfolio to help me get a job in game development. After getting a degree in Comp Sci, it never truly dawned on me to actually have a project going on. I told myself back then that I “had to focus on my studies to get a good job.” Well - Magna Cumme Laude came and went, I started working in IT and I learned how wrong I was.
That isn’t to say I had a completely empty portfolio of projects. I had made exactly two mods prior to even graduating from university. They’re for a game called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes: an asymmetric puzzle coop game which has the players take the roles of a bomb squad dealing with a complex contraption. The players need to use information on the bomb in order to solve modules - square segments of the bomb that are essentially individual puzzles.
However, there is a (very admittedly optional) catch: the person in the room with the bomb is not allowed to look at the manual that tells you how to defuse it.
Thus there are two roles in the game: the defuser who physically handles the bomb, and experts who interpret information conveyed by the defuser in order to solve many modules.
I was captivated by this game right around 2020 for reasons that anyone could glean; I suddenly had a lot more free time and was forced into the house. So I jumped into a Discord server and played around a bit with people online, learned the game, learned to love it, and decided to watch a video on how to make a mod for it. At the time I hadn’t considered whether I would actually do it, I had time to kill and I had a habit of listening to or watching videos while playing other games.
When I saw how easy it was to actually make a mod - even if it was empty - I decided to download Unity and try it out for myself. Nowadays, I could probably make something of a higher quality than what I did back then. That said, my first ever solo game development project started just as easily as it ended and I had a listing on the Steam workshop to show for it.
Because I’m stingy about providing links to people, I’ll just point you to where it is and how to play with it (if you choose to). You will need a copy of KTANE to play it, but the game is designed around only needing one person to work. Pick it up while its on sale, I recommend it.
You’ll also need to go to a website called “The Repository of Manual Pages,” which is a very handy database for accessing any and all modded content with KTANE. Both of my module’s manual pages are hosted on that site under the moniker “Raddicus.” That was an alias from back then that was, at the time, closer in relation to my personal identity.
My first ever mod is called Taco Tuesday and, at the time of writing, it has around 950 subscribers. It is admittedly somewhat confusing on the first read, but I think it isn’t a hard module necessarily. I’ve only had a single person complain about it to me, and from what I could tell it was because they misinterpreted some wordings. I haven’t seen anything of a similar sentiment on the workshop page (yet).
That was all said and good, but I gained a thirst to keep going. I played around in KTANE a bit more, learned some more mods, and eventually came across someone who I had a somewhat passing relationship with. I won’t name names for anonymity’s sake, but they essentially made a joke about another mod on the workshop called Neutralization. They specifically said “I want a Cruel Neutralization,” to which I responded “I can make it for you if you design it.”
(A note about the use of the word cruel. There is a subset of mods on the repository that are prefixed with cruel to denote that they are based on an existing mod, and that those mods are specifically designed to be more difficult.)
About a month or two later, my second mod ever - plus my first collaborative project - graced the workshop: Stoichiometry. I will note that stoichiometry is a specific field of science that has nothing to do with what you do in the mod. I am admittedly quite proud of this one, compared to Taco Tuesday it has a lot more customization going on. It has two seven-segment displays, an alternating list of bases and salts, two vents on either side of the vial containing a colorful liquid inside, and custom sounds (courtesy of an additional dev brought on to work with us).
It’s no secret that I think this mod is hard. Not needlessly hard, more that the difficulty is reliant on experience with the mod and knowing where to look at what points; akin to Taco Tuesday.
Speaking of which, you wouldn’t believe the number of people who are subscribed to Stoichiometry: 926.
Just to compare, the exact number of people who are subscribed to Taco Tuesday is 954. My original mod, which took less time, effort, and creativity to create was more popular by a slim margin. I always wondered why and came up with possibilities, but voicing them would eliminate one of my driving forces.
Since the workshop pages aren’t to sites affiliated with this one, I encourage you to look at the Steam Workshop and the repository if you’re interested at all.
I’m going to cap this blog post off here to prevent droning on. A note about the matter: I will probably only refer to these projects in future posts if specifically necessary. I will also only refer to them as “my first mod” and “my second mod” if I do. I’ll make sure to point back here when I do so.
