So, we have this new UI programmer at work. He's a sweet fella who switched from web development to game development and is willing to put in the effort to make that work. He's good at wrangling our horrible semi-webdev tech stack using Typescript and Sass for game UI, but he hadn't written any C++ since college, and he's eager to learn.

Since I need a "project" to keep myself motivated and not lose my goddamn mind at this place, I offered to mentor him in the boring parts of game development. He was very enthusiastic about that. I now have a session with him every week, and together we've set up a main loop, a logging system, a service locator pattern, and how to handle input actions. All from scratch, in C++, with the help of some dependencies. Honestly, it's pretty dry stuff to me, but my student is really excited about it. To teach him these concepts, I wrote my own game project in parallel to figure out how best to explain things. So far, that's worked pretty well.

But now that we've covered the basics, it's time to teach him the real meat and potatoes of modern game development: Entity-Component Systems. So this Sunday, I dove into the EnTT framework. I emerged a few inspired hours later with something that resembled a game. Which means that besides the AAA game that's supposed to be my full-time job and the adult game I've been working on for the past six years, I'm now making a completely different game in an engine I'm building from scratch. Whoops. At least this one will have shooty-bang-bang gameplay!