GameDev: Yr.3

Prologue

Full disclosure, I never set out to be a developer. I've made my own websites since 1996 and built them for clients for about twenty years, by hand in HTML and CSS and later in PHP and WordPress, right alongside twenty-plus years in marketing. But the deep engineering, the stuff underneath the page, I handed to people who were better at it than me.

When I built Wabbit, that's how it worked. I'd outsource the parts I couldn't handle, and I'd built a fantastic remote team in Ukraine to handle them.

And then I lost contact with them.

That was the November before the Russian invasion.

The Breaking Point

I try not to dwell on those early months of the war. The professional crisis paled against the human one. But as I worried about my team's safety, Wabbit faced an existential threat: we'd built our entire technical foundation on outsourced talent.

Now that foundation was gone, and I decided I couldn't leave a hole that size in my own skill set anymore.

My Past Failures

I'd tried learning programming before. Multiple times, actually. But tutorials about building to-do lists and accounting systems never held my attention. Each attempt ended in frustration and abandonment. I needed something that would keep me engaged through the difficult fundamentals.

An Unexpected Solution

A few months before losing contact with my team, I'd started exploring game development and virtual production. Not as a career move, just evening experiments. A creative escape from business pressures.

What followed could have been another failed attempt at learning to code. Instead, attaching the effort to games unlocked everything.

Game development demanded real programming knowledge, and no template or workaround would get me there. But unlike my previous attempts, this one held my interest. Instead of managing data in abstract exercises, I was building worlds and making things react to me.

Year 1: Foundation

From 2022 into 2023, I built my technical skills from the ground up. I started with a "build games with C++" deal from Humble Bundle, then learned Unreal Engine from Stephen Ulibarri's fantastic Udemy courses, and Harvard's CS50 became my guide through computer science fundamentals. I came out with the certificates, but more importantly, I finally began understanding how software really works.

Still, I had large gaps. A lot of computer science stayed frustratingly abstract, and adding game development on top only made things harder. I needed faster, bigger wins.

I needed to use something I already understood...

Year 2: Breakthrough

2024 brought the transformation.

First, I brought my laughable HTML and CSS up to modern standards, then started taking on harder programming problems. JavaScript, Python, Django, React, Three.js. Tools that once seemed impossibly complex became daily companions.

By December, the first playable things were up on this site: Marble Run, a little physics game, and Blasteroid, a retro shooter. They were small, but they were real games that people could play in a browser, and that felt like a milestone.

Meanwhile, in Unreal

None of that replaced Unreal. From 2023 through 2025 I kept making small, self-contained games and vertical slices there: a couple of shooters, some flight experiments, a few platformers. Each one was a way to learn a single thing well enough to finish it.

The ones I loved most were the virtual production tests. I'd build a world, then set up a virtual camera tied to an iPad on a camera mount, and walk around my real room filming inside the game. Twenty-some years of photography and cinematography suddenly had a new medium. I was framing shots and moving the camera the way I always had, except now I'd built the locations myself, and they were limitless.

The Year in Between

At the start of 2025, I wrote here that it would be the year I shifted from learning to creating, and that by the end of it this site would have a variety of games and experiences on it.

It didn't. 2025 went to Wabbit: client work, products, and a platform called Tome that now runs most of what I build, this site included. It was good work, and I'm proud of it. Outside of the Unreal tinkering, it just wasn't games, so I'm not counting it here. Year three is the year the bigger games showed up, and they arrived about six months later than I said they would.

"Shifting from learning to creating" was a sloppy way to put it, too. I've never learned any other way than by making things. Building something is how I lock in what I've just learned, and it's how I find out what I don't understand yet, so the learning and the making have always happened at the same time. That's as true of this year as of any other.

Year 3: The Loop

The biggest thing I built in 2026 wasn't a game. It was the platform for Vanguard, a Star Citizen organization: training, ranks, events, the whole operation. It's the largest piece of software I've ever been responsible for, and it's in daily use by real people who'd tell me fast if it broke.

That same game gave me the project I care about most.

I fly in Star Citizen, a lot. It's easily my favorite game and has been for 13 years. What matters for our conversation here is that flying well in that game is hard. Ships move on six axes at once, and flight skill is mostly invisible until you meet someone who has it.

As great as that game is, comprehensive training options are limited. So... I built a trainer: 6DoF Academy. It has drills, flight logs, ship profiles, and more. And its whole job is to give me (and my friends, and anyone else who wants to get better) somewhere to practice that isn't the middle of a fight. Right now it's open to a small testing team made up of some of the top pilots in Star Citizen, and they've been generous and brutal in about equal measure. I plan to open it to everyone before the end of the year. An official launch on Steam will follow shortly after.

It runs entirely in a web browser, and it works with whatever a pilot already flies with: a pressure-sensitive keyboard, dual sticks, rudder pedals, control surfaces, in any combination and any number. Most Star Citizen pilots with a setup like that end up running middleman software like vJoy or Joystick Gremlin just to get all their hardware talking to the game. 6DoF doesn't need any of it. You plug in, set it up once, and fly.

6DoF only exists because a few unrelated parts of my life ended up in the same room. The pilot knew what needed training. The developer could build it. The marketer knew how to recruit testers, listen to them, and turn their notes into the next week's work. None of those three could have made it alone, and I didn't plan for them to meet. That's the way I usually learn anything new: I don't mind being a beginner, because sooner or later the new thing connects to something I already know, and from there it gets easier.

Then there's Reaxxion. Ataxx was one of my favorite arcade games as a kid, so I rebuilt it as a solo 3D game on a hex board, with gooey creatures that split and swallow each other, and computer opponents at a few levels of meanness. It's been a strange pleasure to play it again as an adult and finally see how it works. A board has to be fair to both players before it can be interesting, and I had to learn how a layout's shape decides which strategies win on it. Kid me just knew some boards felt better than others. Now I know why.

There's smaller stuff too, like the car configurator in the garage, plus a few experiments that may never grow up. Done is better than perfect.

The Robot in the Room

I'll admit there's a part of me that's a little sad about this. I spent years learning to engineer software, and partway through, a machine came along that writes it faster than people do. A lot of what I built this year, I built with an AI partner doing much of the grunt work.

I'm still grateful I did the education. Learning it the hard way is what lets me direct it well. I know what's happening and why. I can see when it's about to make a bad decision, and I can tell it why the decision is bad. Without those years spent learning computer science, I'd be a passenger, and a mostly clueless one at that.

Looking Forward

Last time I put a date on something here and missed it, so for what comes after 6DoF, I'm not going to.

I'll tell you what I'm interested in, though. Unreal is where this started, and I've been wanting to do something bigger there than another slice. I've started pulling apart Bushido Blade, a PS1 fighting game I loved in my youth, to understand what made it work, with the idea of building a successor in Unreal Engine 5. Maybe that's 2027, maybe later... Meanwhile, 6DoF keeps growing, Reaxxion keeps getting better, and the flywheel of my efforts keeps turning.