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January 25th, 2018

As a pixel artist and game designer from the 8 and 16 bit era, I often wondered if i had what it took to make a game solo. Having made a few tiny solo projects in "Blitz Basic" in the 90's, mainly interactive books for my kids, I find myself with time on my hands. I wanted a simple but fun game mechanic. I decided to make a retro game based on an early arcade game. The game mechanic I chose was something close to Lunar Lander, except I decided to go for a flying bird theme and hence "Baby Bird" was born!! :) I started the project in "Cerberus X" (formerly "Monkey X") a language very close to "Blitz Basic" and so something I had a least a little knowledge of. I spent a couple of weeks getting my bird to animate and fly around the screen in a very pleasing manner. However, I soon realised I had bitten off more than I could chew with "Cerberus X". "Cerberus X" is an excellent programming language for game makers. It's free and can output to all sorts of platforms. The only problem was, I am not a programmer. I was on the verge of giving up after a couple of days trying to fix an annoying collision bug. I started researching engines and narrowed my choice down to "Godot", "Game Maker" and "Construct". "Godot" had the advantage of being free but didn't seem as refined as the other two. I downloaded "Game Maker" and had a tinker with it. I liked the sprite editor but not much else. I can't put my finger on it but I just didn't get on with it. I then downloaded "Construct 2" and there's where things finally took off!

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