Hello! My name is Garret and I blog about coding, creativity, and the pursuit of meaning.

I made this blog in May 2024 to track my progress on a Unity project that I started at the same time. I challenged myself to focus on, and blog about, one project, for 30-days.

I’m a novice developer who has been tinkering with computers since childhood in the early 90’s but I never got deep into programing. I mostly played games but I was always finding myself having to interact with coding while gaming. An early introduction to coding was when I hosted a server for a multiplayer third-person shooter called “The Specialists”. The Specialists was a mod for the very popular FPS Half-Life but it only ever had a small cult-following. As such, at this time there were around 15 servers to play on and some of them were on the other side of the county or world. My brother and I loved it and I became interested in hosting a server for us and, I remember thinking, people from around the world, to play on. I remember wanting to see if I could do it without having to pay a hosting company and thinking how cool it was that I could have people connecting to a server on Steam that I would eventually have sitting under the bunk-bed I shared with my brother. So I began!

I used a crappy old Dell computer that my Dad had and set it up next to my computer “gaming computer”, which, at this time was a pre-built Fry’s branded computer that didn’t ship with a dedicated graphics card. I then opened up “Yahoo!!!” and searched around the various Half-Life forums for a guide on hosting a server for a Half-Life Mod. I remember entering a state of hyper focus as I browsed forums, downloaded server config files while sending commands to my computer using CMD Prompt and feeling like a real hacker. After a couple hours I had a dedicated server running on my home network and was working on installing various plugins and mods that customized the gameplay on my server. Editing text files to change basic settings like the server’s name, all the way to editing the variables in the mods scripts to alter the games balance and mechanics. I learned alot very quickly and the learning process was made better by the immediate gratification I recieved when I altered some code, re-deploy the server and experience the changes you made first hand. Once I was happy with the configuration I moved on to getting it online. I quickly learned that this process would require me to open up ports in my family router. I did so successfully and by the end of the day I had a dedication server up and running on an old computer under my bed.

The server quickly became popular and as long as I had it running would be full of players. I remember coming home and resorting to kicking players so that my brother and I could join. Looking back this was admin abuse but in my defense they weren’t paying me and I wasn’t going to listen to the servers fans whirl knowing good and well that it was someone else heating up the processor and not me. I was a real menance.

I think this experience taught me that all the resources you need to learn how to code are available online, they are often free, and a big part of software development culture is assisting your fellow dev learn, grow and realize their ideas.

Through out the years I have also learned web development languages to make websites for my various hobbies. I Learned about game development by downloading game engines and experimenting. But I have never, in 30 years, finished a project. And to me, finishing a project wouldn’t necessarily mean releasing it to the public. I haven’t even finished a storyline in a game, or designed a “game over” screen because I have never linked together enough game mechanics to warrant a “game over” screen! Nothing. I have a nasty habit of starting projects with excitement and motivation, only to fizzle out toward the “mid-game”. My hope is that by gamifying my goal I will maintain discipline and should I fail it will be nice to see what my thinking was leading up to abandoning the project.

Thanks for stopping by!