I'm making a game.

My biggest hurdle in game dev is the fact that I am a complete beginner at coding games. And coding in general. A fact that for a very long time convinced me that it wasn't worth trying. It's a lot easier to decide you can't do something than try. And being honest, I was depressed, in a truly horrific living situation for many years, and my brain was foggy and unfocused. I may not have been able to. (I wish I had honestly tried though.)

But I'm in such a better place than I was in the past. Newly on adhd medication that's working for me, a semi stable roof over my head, medical care and a better support system than I've had in years. Life is far from perfect, but the imperfections have a level of predictability that life didn't have before. It's manageable.

I was looking at mods for Stardew Valley (I haven't played vanilla Stardew in years) and I was overcome with frustration at the fact that there are really... really limited mods if you're a gay man. Stardew has it's share of NSFW mods, but as far as I could find, only one featured the bachelors at all, and it was very basic, very bare bones. I don't feel entitled to mods, of course that's folks putting in a lot of work for free because they enjoy it or they personally want features they make, but the rise in frustration was not towards Stardew Valley's modding scene alone. This is a very common trend in NSFW gaming spaces (and by extension, in my experience, NSFW spaces online in their entirety). You simply cannot find games that focus on gay men without digging. The most reliable type of game featuring gay men I would say is yaoi/BL visual novels. Which is great, but absolutely lacking in variety, and quite honestly... still typically caters to straight women.

Games that feature both men and women as romance options I find tend to still have a heavy lean towards women, often having more options and more variation and a very clear difference in quality of writing. This doesn't even begin to touch on the lack of transmasculine characters, or lack of dark or even complex content in the stories, or NSFW romance games that break out of the visual novel format. I hunger for homoerotic content, men in fucked up little situations fucking and sucking. I long for erotic games to have decent plot and to take themselves seriously. I realized I have hands and a brain that's becoming less fogged up with depression and bad life situations and I realized I long for a project to work on.

So I'm making a game.

I don't know if I'll finish it, or where it will go. I'm actually making this game as a love letter to my husband, who loves games and also hates the lack of games featuring gay trans men. I'm making him a game, indulgent and lovingly crafted to hopefully be a game he adores.

Which brings us back to my biggest hurdle in game development.The fact that I am a complete beginner at coding games. I have dabbled lightly in html, css, and poked at javascript. I would not say I'm good at any of them, or really know what I'm doing at all. But I am excited and I want to learn and I feel a focus I've never had before (ADHD meds will do that).

I'm following a tutorial on how to set up very basic farming sim functions in Godot and I actually feel like I'm processing and retaining information! I made a little character, on a little island, and they can walk in all four directions, and when they stop walking they return to their idle animation and retain the direction they were facing! When you left mouse click they use their tool (axe, hoe, watering can). It's not much, but I am slowly learning. Things are making sense to me. Next I am going to learn how to build a UI so the player can pick the tool, rather than me having to swap that in the game engine. Baby steps!

Making games has quite literally been a dream of mine since I was a very small child, and I may be pushing 30 but getting started now is better than never, I think.