Timeline

Here I will list things I’ve done since I started game developing.
The earlier times had a lot of small projects, so I might leave some of them out if they’re not interesting or hardly had any code, or simply because I’ve forgotten about them.
It’s a reasonable thing to do a reverse chronological list I presume.

• 2025
  • April-ish. I created an itch.io account to upload school projects.
    After this, we did a few more group projects, and tested both android mobile game making and VR game making in UE. Those were small prototypes only for testing some functionality of each.
    There was a lot of problems getting it to run and testing it properly, and it was too little time to get any good understanding of it all, in my opinion.
    A bit of a stressful and frustrating end of the first term, but there was still a lot of fun.
  • Mars. I started to study Unreal Engine. At Grit Academy.
    We first had a personal project to present, and later we got group assignments. We had three weeks to make a game, groups were five to six people. We collaborated with the graphic artist course.
    In my group we created the project ShapeShifter, and the game’s final name is Jespurr’s Journey. I’s a platformer with a shape shifting character/vehicle, letting the player freely shift between sphere, cube and pyramid. The different shapes grant the player different platforming abilities.
    I was the group leader but also mainly responsible for the controls of the platforming. And I’m proud of how it turned out.
    Most of all, I put a lot of time into making the sphere shape move like a ball and still be controllable.
    In UE, it turns out that you can’t both have a sphere rolling like a sphere through the built in physics and control it at the same time. If you want to control it, you have to make the rolling physics by yourself. And I kind of did.
    In the end I found that altering the slope walkability in real time based on the character speed was the easiest way to get it to work the way I wanted it. And the rolling is simply rotating the mesh based on speed as well. So there’s not actually any rolling of a sphere going on, but it looks like it. And that’s pretty cool if I say so myself.
  • Around February. I started to study C++ again, at Grit Academy. It was fun and I felt that I knew all of it, until I started to properly learn about pointers… That shit is crazy, until you get it. Can’t say I’m fluid in pointers yet. But what finally made me get it was the realization that C# does it for you, in the background. Every time I send parameters into a function, C# sends a pointer or not a pointer with every parameter.
    Having learned a good bit about pointers, suddenly getting that made it all fit into… my brain. Somehow.
    As a final project for that course I made a text based version of an old swedish board game called ”Drakborgen”. In English it was called DungeonQuest.
    I’m calling it Drakborgen++.
    I changed things because of the text based only graphic limitations, but I try to keep it true to the original. It’s an interpretation of course.
    Still plan to finish it. It didn’t have to be a full game for the presentation.
    Eventually I will put it up on Github and itch.io, as well as having a page for it here.
  • January. Began my new school, at Grit Academy. A vocational university. The game programmer course.
    First two weeks was a game design course, fun and aloof. We got to develop board games. A lot of board games. The point was to learn to make prototypes, bad ones, to be able to throw it out when testing proved it wasn’t good enough.
    I still tinker on one of them… I like making board games as well.
• 2023
  • July to September. I began relearning html and css. I started work on my site, this one, to use as my journal of game development and online programming portfolio.
  • Mars and April. I started learning C#, and began developing Treasure Cave as the final assignment for the course.
• 2017
  • Summer. I began writing a small text based game in C++ called The Desert.
    It positioned you as an amnesiac awakening inside a stone structure in the middle of a desert, leaving you to investigate your surroundings.
    The ambition was to create a cryptic story where you slowly realized your destiny and run from a terrible sand storm in the distance.
    Using time units in the game based on how much you chose to do before moving on, the time when the storm would reach you would differ. And it was fatal.
    It didn’t get far and are abandoned, but not forgotten. Maybe I will use the idea for a C#-version sometime.
  • Spring. I learned the basics of C++ through a distance course. Although a certain amount of this forever got stuck in my head, I haven’t used it much since then.
• 2016
  • Winter. Me and my brother started making an isometric game, its project name was Puzzle Flee… Later it was named Teradoña and the Caves of Nevermind.
    It is made in javascript canvas.
• 2015
  • Summer. Me and my brother started another game project for Wii U, called Mycel Killer, a game where you must burn bush like, rapidly growing, mycels infesting and decomposing a building. Made in javascript.
    It was a 2D, pixel art game with a top down view.
    It didn’t take off, mostly because Wii U was getting old and releasing games on it was expensive. We abandoned it the same year.
  • April. We released Guac’ A Mole on the Wii U e-shop after a year of development.
    Here’s Guac’ A Mole’s website with screenshots and a gameplay video.
    It sold a small amount of copies and we barely earned back the amount we paid to get an age rating in Europe. But not nearly the amount we paid to keep the Wii U developer kit.
• 2014
  • Early in the year, me and my brother started developing Guac’ A Mole. The name is an ingenious(?) mix of guacamole and whack a mole. And that’s also basically what the game is.
    A weird puzzle game for Wii U where you rotate a planet with the motion controller of the console. From the planet emerges avocado mole mutants, and from space, burning asteroids come tumbling down at you (the planet).
    The solution is to rotate so that the moles are hit by the asteroids, thereby killing your pests by using them as shields against the space threat.
    It wasn’t gonna win an Oscar for best manuscript, but hey, it’s a game, it cant win Oscars.
    It made great use of the Wii U motion controller.
• 2013
  • Sometime late this year. I started learning html and css, with my brother as my teacher; short after that, javascript and canvas.
  • Earlier this year. Me and my brother heard of a project of Nintendo, Nintendo Web Framework, where html5, javascript and canvas could be used to make games for Wii U, and that anyone registered as a business could borrow a developer kit!
    Yes, we were excited. We discussed the possibility, and my brother demanded that if we were to try this, I would have to learn to code.
    I accepted. We ordered a Wii U developer kit.
• 2012
  • We worked on a PC game, called Terrible Things. Made in Monogame, with C#.
    It was a top down view shooter, with the typical silhouette style that so many games used around then and later.
    Back then, I was only in charge of graphics. I couldn’t code yet.
    The impressive thing here was the enemies, which were a black, hairy, mass. Terrible things. It filled the levels, crawling along the walls, bulging towards you, and had to be purged by finding and eliminating some bases from which the mass emanated.
    On the nodes beneath the bases, you could install an upgrade to your arsenal, adding fire power and additional weapons.
    As always, we had great plans, but something made the development halt, and we never picked up from that.
    But this was one of the few PC games where we actually had a working version with functional gameplay. Many projects never even had any controls for a player.
• 2010
  • Around this time, I had realized that a lot of people made games on the web, which were meant to be played via the Wii Opera browser with the Wii remote. Yes, that was a thing.
    Me, my brother and a friend thought it would be fun to do this too. We brain stormed a bit, and we came up with a point and click adventure-idea we called Struggle.
    We had the idea that one would wake up in a forest with amnesia (the best bloody gimmick for games) and move around to find a futuristic city abandoned, mysterious creatures running about, possibly dangerous, and that everything is on a floating sky island.
    I had an idea about nano technology that had gone rampant and became impossible to control. The people working on the island had fled, but your escape pod had failed and crashed in the forest.
    The big reveal would be that this island was already an escape from the polluted surface where mankind had gone to research solutions to save their planet, but instead, they had created another threat that went out of their hands and destroyed their new safe haven too.
    On top of it all, as the main character you remember in the end that the nano machine project failure was your fault, because you had gone on with it despite warnings and then something went wrong and the nano machines started randomly change animals’ and plants’ dna and mutating them.
    I had a vague idea that the end was the main character throwing himself over the edge of the island, down into the yellow mists below.
    The story wasn’t finished, there was no final ideas on where the others had gone. Would the main character experience any changes from the nano machines infesting? How would possible threats work in a point and click game?
    And we weren’t united in this story, this was all my version.
    Still, a somewhat cool story with great possibilities if all the loose ends could get satisfying answers.
    And maybe one would want to make the end a bit less gloomy…
• 2008
  • Another PC game project, called Archipelago.
    I think this was my brother’s first attempt at openGL, and he was about building a pretty extensive graphic engine for all our future games…
    I was drawing graphics on paper for the first time. We had realized computers didn’t really have graphical limitations anymore, so scanning and using drawn graphics in full colour was not gonna be a problem.
    This game was our first attempt to create a game without any killing, or defeating monsters.
    We both wanted it to be like a Harvest Moon, but with the possibility to own several farms if you chose to, and an exploration game.
    You’d start on one island full of places and different plants and animals to learn about and use for trade and commerce, you would be able to have a shop as well. On this island you could stay and do agriculture, trading and all that if you wanted.
    But you could also buy a boat when you made enough money, and travel the sea to fish, and find new islands with completely different plant life and fauna.
    On top of all this I wanted to add climbing and scenarios that became problem solving parts of the game, like finding a village plagued by an intrusive plant or mold or something, and then you could choose to do research on it and find a way to get rid of it.
    As a lot of the times, we had way too high ambitions for this game. And it didn’t get anywhere but some graphics showing on screen.
• The Early Years
  • From here on, I don’t really remember exact years. Only approximately in which order what came.