Brick Birthday and Dreams of Making Games

The story of certain bricks

In the 80s and early 90s, a certain man worked on various construction sites in Czechoslovakia. He had a little daughter in Poland. Those were times when money was tight. Still, whenever that dad returned home, he wanted to bring his child a bit of joy. And so, from time to time, he bought different LEGO® sets for his little one. That girl liked those bricks and took very good care of them. But her childhood started coming to an end, and her younger brother was born. Two years later, the siblings gained a little sister. The bricks waited in the wardrobe until the kids grew a bit.

And then one day, those wonderful plastic toys landed in my little hands. That is how my passion began. Building my own pirate ship from the parts available, gladiator tournaments, even playing ski jumping (Małysz always won 😄). I loved playing with them, making my own builds, acting out scenes with knights. Wonderful years.

Even back then, I was most fascinated by the pirate captain (the famous Redbeard). I did not have the legendary Barracuda (ahh), but there was a small set with a crew and a monkey. That was enough to set a child’s imagination in motion. Something stayed with me, because pirates still fascinate me today.

Dreams of making games

My interest in pirates led me to an online game known as Seafight, which was a simple multiplayer game. I will not talk too much about it, because on one hand I really liked it for the atmosphere, but on the other, microtransactions ruled out fair play. Interestingly, the game still exists today.

My dislike for pay-to-win game systems pushed me toward creating my own alternative. That was when the first plans for my own game about pirates appeared. But I had no experience then, so I could not really make anything. All I could do was dream and design. The plans waited in a drawer.

In the meantime, while I was in middle school, I discovered Minecraft. Wonderful game, I spent many hours in it. I always wanted something more than the base gameplay offered, though. That is how my adventure with creating servers for that game began. Elements of design, programming, marketing, and many others gave me nice basic experience. I will probably write about those servers in another post, because that is a pretty good story on its own.

After technical school, I made my first two mobile games. The first one was available on the Google Play Store. It was a simple game where you had to click the correct color of balls falling from the top of the screen. The second one, which took me a year to make, was more complicated and landed on the Apple Store. It was about samurai duels. The player stood opposite another player or an NPC, and after the sound of a gong, you had to tap the screen as quickly as possible to strike the opponent. The faster one won. With coins from victories, you could buy different outfits and weapons that, apart from looks, gave you nothing. Neither of those games was a success :) What mattered, though, was that they gave me valuable experience and “points” during job interviews. Because yes, my dreams kept pushing me toward the profession commonly known as ‘PROGRAMMER’. Only this way could I start making my dream real -> creating my own pirate game 🦜🏴‍☠️☠️.

Years go by

My programming career developed. There was a time when I worked on games for online casinos, where I built a roulette game from scratch with a team. After working there for a year, I decided I had enough knowledge to start making my own game. Since then I have been experimenting with different libraries and engines. I designed and searched for solutions that would let me recreate the vision in my head in a simple way. It was slow going, though. It is hard to program something when you sit at work for 8 hours a day. And so more years passed. Every year I had an episode where I could spend an intense 2-3 months creating, only to spend the following months doing something else. Last year, however, things were supposed to go differently. The design phase ended, and I settled on what my work would ultimately look like. By that time I already had quite a lot of things ready: scripts meant to shorten my work time, techniques for creating graphics. In general, a lot of needed stuff. Goals set, tasks written out. So I started writing code in the Defold engine. And I made quite a lot.

Alpha and Omega

But then something knocked me out of rhythm again. I do not know whether it was moving, or other things sitting in my head. The development process stopped for a few months. Did “this time will be different” turn out to be yet another common burst of a dream? I do not think so. I already have quite solid foundations, and I want to finish this game. Despite all those breaks, the project keeps moving forward. This blog is the next stage. I will publicly document the process of shaping my video game here. I hope it gives me some extra motivation and that I get at least a little feedback and criticism, which will help create a better final product. Of course, I will also share my passion for the bricks I mentioned at the beginning. I hope that after reading this post, it will not seem like such a strange combination 😅. Soon I will publish more texts revealing my vision for the game, as well as articles about bricks.

That is it for now! I am ending this post, but officially opening the story of this blog 🍾🎉🎂!

Talk soon!