Who am I and what’s Capable Games?

Welcome to the blog! The first post after much, much procrastination is finally here, and you’re reading it. You might be wondering who I am (hi!) and what Capable Games is, and here you are to find out. It’s strange how post titles work, isn’t it? Onto two (or even more) of the five “W”s.

The 5 “W”s – Who, What, Where, When, Why

Who am I?

I’m Sam.

I’m not going to leave you there though – I work in a call centre, have the bad habit of getting into a series of books and a Computer Science degree which isn’t being used and feel like getting into other things. This site is one of those other things, to get back into making things and game development and sharing (hopefully) useful information about what I’m up to.

What is Capable Games?

At the moment, Capable Games can be about a lot of things – Pretty much anything to do with Games that takes my fancy, but I see it mostly being about:

Games

I know, I know, it’s right in the name.

This brain of mine has plenty of ideas for games and things that I can make, enhance or otherwise do. From top trumps style games that battle Wikipedia articles (such as Wiki Arena, not mine) to games involving submarines stuck in arctic (or is that antarctic) ice and simulators.

As and when games are released, they’ll have the Game Release category, you can check there for the latest.

Dev logs

Part of making games will be sharing the progress, hence, dev logs!

Feedback and progress are the two most important parts of game development… I’m sure someone has said that at some point in time. There’s no point making a game when no one knows it exists, or that has no market, or will frustrate it’s players instead of giving them hours of playtime that they enjoy.

Dev logs fill in that gap, and allow everyone to see the progress of any games that are in progress and share struggles and solutions. I can’t promise when they’ll be out or exactly what they’ll include (I’ve not got that far yet) or that they’ll be out for every major game or major thing that happens (they almost certainly wont), but they’ll get the broad strokes.

Check out the Dev Log category to see if there have been any.

Tutorials

Sharing is almost as important as doing, especially for knowledge.

There are things out there that are little understood and poorly documented, in my own way I can change that. Whether it’s a full “course” of tutorials on how to make a (VR?) game in BabylonJS or how to implement Epic Online Services into Mirror and Unity (both of which are vaguely planned for the future, once I work them out myself) I hope they’ll provide an excellent resource for people looking to solve those kind of problems themselves.

See the Tutorial category to check any tutorials which have been posted.

Other stuff

There might be other stuff that’s included – as I’ve mentioned, for now Capable Games will be a place to put anything and everything that I do that’s game related. If I need to write some library or package or asset that can be used everywhere, why not release it as a Unity Asset?

If I get my act together, there’s also the Game Makers Tool Kit 2023 game jam coming up in July….