It only took a few decades, but I’m finally making my own video game.

It Started with a VIC-20 and a Dream

Picture this: it’s the early 90s, and a much younger me is hunched over a Commodore VIC-20. I’ve got a game book open to a page with a simple spider-themed game, and I’m painstakingly typing out lines of BASIC code by hand. I have no clue what most of it means - I’m literally copying it out of the book - but I’m utterly mesmerised. The idea that I could write a program and watch a game come to life on the screen blew my tiny mind. Ever since those VIC-20 days, I’ve dreamed of building my own game from scratch. There wasn't really an obvious career path to it for me in the 90's and I ended up getting as close as I could by becoming a web designer but now, 30 years later I’m finally taking the plunge into game development. The project is called Star Fall, and it’s the realisation of that childhood dream.

Star Fall is a top-down “bullet heaven” shooter set in the depths of space - think endless swarms of enemies, cool power ups and relentless chaos.

Basically, it's Vampire Survivors.. in space.

There IS just one slight hitch...

I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

Once more for the people in the back: I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M DOING, but hey, that’s part of the fun. Despite decades of coding experience, making a game is a whole new world for me. I’m a total newbie at this. I went from being the "seasoned software engineer" at work to feeling like a clueless kid fiddling with code again. I’ve dived into the Godot game engine to build Star Fall, and every day I’m watching multiple YouTube videos and googling the most basic stuff because 'thing no work and don't know why'.

The funny thing is, I’m not even ashamed of it. In fact, it’s liberating to be bad at something again and just embrace the learning curve. When you don’t know the “right” way to do things, you’re free to experiment and make mistakes. Sure, my code is probably a hot mess of spaghetti logic and I’ve left a trail of wonky physics and glitchy sprites in my wake, but who cares? I’ll refactor later (maybe). For now, I’m stumbling enthusiastically through the dark, and somehow finding my way by bumping into things. It’s glorious.

As I start to learn a few things I've been going back and realising that a lot of my web dev knowledge does still apply, separation of concerns, component based architecture, composition vs inheritance all still very useful paradigms to follow here too. Plus there are universal coding standards like DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself), YAGNI (You ain't gonna need it) and SOLID (google it) which all still apply and make for a better codebase. Of course I started this project by vibe coding so most of the code is in an utter state...

Vibes-Driven Development

One of the wildest parts of this journey is how unstructured and spontaneous I’ve been with it. At work, I’m used to planning things out: writing design docs, following best practices, keeping things organised. With Star Fall, I’ve thrown a lot of that out the window - and I’m totally vibe coding this thing. What do I mean by “vibe coding”? I mean I’m largely coding by feel - letting my intuition and excitement drive what I work on next, rather than some rigid plan. I’ll wake up one day with a cool idea for a weapon power-up and decide “yep, implementing that today,” even if it wasn’t on any roadmap. I’m building this game in a very organic, chaotic way, adding whatever features feel right in the moment. It’s the kind of freeform creativity that you can’t usually get away with in a big software project, but for a solo hobby project it’s perfect. It keeps me energised and always looking forward to the next evening of coding. Will this result in some refactoring nightmares later? Almost certainly. Am I bothered about that right now? Not one bit. I’m riding the creative wave.

I have some organisation of course - I'm not a lunatic - I've got a Jira board (although the tickets would NOT pass muster in a real team) and I'm even raising Pull Requests (even though my descriptions are often just useless comments and jokes. I added a sun to my game yesterday and my PR literally just said "AND THE LORD SAID, LET THERE BE LIGHT!"

Of course, it wouldn't be true Vibe Coding if I wasn't letting AI write most of the code and here is where the only negative part of this article will live:

I've seen a lot of comments online about how AI produces garbage and when I've used it for my work, I've never found that to be the case, of course I follow my own advice when it comes to things like using planfiles and writing great prompts but I also do actually know how to write really high quality code for a TypeScript web project. Which means that - at work - I'm not actually "Vibe coding" I'm coding with AI assistance. Which as it turns out is a VERY different beast.

When you don't know how to actually write code (I've never written anything in GDScript before, hell I'd never heard of it before 2 weeks ago!) AI is - shall we say - challenging to work with.

I've tried to follow the principles that I know are universal and as I've started to learn how the Godot engine works and have realised that there are other paradigms I can pull in, things have improved but even so, AI has written 100% of my code so far save for the odd tweak to a parameter and I can tell just by looking at it that the code is a hot mess but I don't yet know enough to fix it.

The thing is though, the game works and I know enough about prompting to get it to fix performance issues and refactor things in a way that improves things enough for me to get by, so for the first time in my life... I don't really care that the code is crap.

Honestly, it's kinda liberating!

New Skills Unlocked: Art, Sound, and More

Building a game isn’t just writing code; there a LOT more to it, honestly I've always quietly considered myself a Polymath and if you want to build a game by yourself then you are really testing your mettle on that!

Star Fall is pushing me into a ton of creative areas I’ve never really touched before, and I’m keen to learn every single one (even if I’m terrible at them to start with). For one, I’ve become a pixel artist… by necessity. I fired up Aseprite and started drawing my own spaceship and alien sprites, pixel by pixel. Let me tell you, my first few sprites looked like doodles a 5-year-old might draw in MS Paint. But with practice (and a lot of tweaking), I think I've now reached the level an 8 year old could manage. Give me a few more months of really hard work and practice and I might even hit double digits!

Then there’s game design itself – crafting enemy wave patterns, deciding how power-ups work, balancing weapons and upgrades. I’ve never done anything like that in my life. It’s like I have to put on a game designer hat, a level designer hat, and even an artist hat on top of my coder cap. I’m even dabbling in sound design (or at least curating sound effects) because what’s a space shooter without some pew-pew lasers and boom-y explosions? My current sound effects are mostly placeholders (some are free sounds I found online, and one might be me literally making an explosion noise into a microphone… we don’t talk about that). I’ll polish all that later; the point is I’m learning all these new skills on the fly. It’s challenging as heck, but it’s also the most fun I’ve had in ages. Every day I unlock a new “achievement” in Game Dev 101 – whether it’s figuring out how to make a cool particle explosion or composing a single decent 8-bit chiptune loop. It’s a crazy creative rush, and I’m loving it.

Easier Than Expected, Harder Than Expected

Going into this, I had a lot of assumptions about what would be easy or hard. Let’s just say some of those assumptions were dead wrong. Game development has surprised me in both good and challenging ways:

• Easier than expected: Getting a basic prototype up and running wasn’t the nightmare I thought it’d be. Godot’s engine is incredibly friendly for newcomers. Within a couple of hours, I had a little ship flying around on the screen and enemies spawning in. The fact that I could write a few lines of code and see immediate on-screen action was magic. Modern game engines and tools have made a lot of things - like physics, collisions, and input handling - almost plug-and-play. It’s kind of mind-blowing how quickly you can get something playable together.
• Harder than expected: Polishing literally everything. Making a functional game and making a fun, juicy, polished game are two completely different things. I can get something on screen, sure - but making it feel good? Oh boy. Tuning the controls to feel just right, tweaking the difficulty so the game is challenging but not impossible, ensuring the explosions are satisfying, balancing the power-ups - that stuff is an artform and it’s kicking my butt. I have a new appreciation for all the tiny details game devs sweat over. Even creating a half-decent UI for the game (menus, HUD, etc.) ended up being a rabbit hole I wasn’t prepared for. Turns out my years of web UI experience only kind of translate - a slick website isn’t the same as an intuitive game HUD, and I’m learning the difference the hard way.
• Easier than expected: Help is everywhere. Between the Godot documentation, friendly indie dev forums, and yes, even AI assistants, I’ve never felt truly stuck. Back in the day, if I hit a snag coding, I might have to comb through a 600-page manual or cry in a corner or shudder ask on Stack Overflow. Now I can quickly search for a solution or ask an AI, and boom – someone’s probably solved a similar issue. The abundance of tutorials and open-source examples out there meant I had lots of breadcrumbs to follow. It’s like having a team of mentors on standby 24/7.
• Harder than expected: Creating assets that don’t look (or sound) like garbage. I mentioned my art attempts - getting better, but still rough. Same goes for sound and music. I’ve played amazing indie games with gorgeous pixel art and pro-level sound, and here I am making do with free art assets and royalty-free pew-pew sounds. It’s humbling. There’s also just so much to do. In web dev, I might specialise in frontend and someone else handles the design or the backend. Here, I’m the designer, developer, artist, QA tester, and audio tech all in one. Juggling all these roles is hard. It’s a blast to learn, but it definitely stretched me thin at times. I’ll be in the zone coding enemy AI, when I realise, “Oh, I need a sprite for that boss ship” and suddenly I’m in Photoshop drawing something that vaguely looks like a space crab or trawling the internet for an asset that I'm just going to replace later on anyway. My brain is constantly context-switching between different skill sets. It’s exhilarating, but also exhausting!

Having a Blast (Like It’s 1995)

Perhaps the best part of all of this is just how much fun I’m having. I genuinely feel like I’m transported back to the mid-90s, back to when I first discovered programming and the web. The same kind of excitement I felt when I wrote my first HTML page in 1995 and saw a <marquee> tag make text move across the screen on my GeoCities site - that wide-eyed “whoa, I made that!” feeling - I’m getting it again with game development (Btw I found out whilst writing this article that if you google 'Geocities' the search results are all in Comic Sans 😂).

Every time I hit the “Play” button in Godot and see something I created move or explode on the screen, I can’t help but grin. It’s pure magic. I’m giggling like an idiot when things work, doing little victory dances in my chair at 2 AM when I finally squash a bug. I haven’t felt this giddy about coding in a long, long time.

There’s something profoundly creative and energising about making a game, even more so than what I do in my day job. Don’t get me wrong - I love web development, I always have. But this is tapping into that childlike wonder that got me into computers in the first place. It’s like I’ve re-discovered why I fell in love with coding. And it’s not just about the nostalgia, either; it’s about the freshness of it all. At 40 er... something, it’s easy to get a bit set in your ways, to be the expert who’s seen it all. But here I am, a total novice again, learning and creating with the enthusiasm of a newbie. It’s kind of addictive.

I also have to say, working on Star Fall has been a great reminder of why side projects are so rewarding. There’s no boss, no client, no deadline. I’m doing this purely for me, for the sheer joy of it. That’s a special feeling. It reminds me of being that kid who would code little programs or build silly websites just for fun, not because anyone asked me to. Sometimes, in the grind of professional programming, you lose that playful, exploratory spirit. Building this game has given it back to me.

So what’s next? Honestly, I’m just going to keep riding this wave. There’s so much left to do on Star Fall - from adding more enemy types, weapons and levels, to eventually polishing the artwork and sound, and who knows, maybe even implementing some kind of progression system or story if I get brave (I actually have some lore I wrote in Notion but I'm not ready to share it yet). I’m sure there will be plenty more hiccups and “I have no idea what I’m doing” moments along the way. But I’m here for it. The journey itself is the reward right now.

If you’re curious about Star Fall or want to follow along with my dev misadventures, I’ve set up a page on itch.io where I’m building the game in public. Check out Star Fall on itch.io - I’ll be posting updates, dev logs, and (eventually) a demo for brave souls to try out. Just be gentle if you do try it - remember, I literally have no idea what I’m doing. And in the end, what this is all about is having fun and making something I’ve always dreamed of. Here’s to finally making that childhood dream game come true, one vibe-coded line at a time.

As a reward for getting to the end of the article, here's a short video of my progress so far: