From Stories to Systems

For a long time, this space has been a bit… quiet.

If you’ve stumbled across this blog before, you might have seen short stories, poems, or bits of fiction—creative experiments written at different points in my life. That part of me hasn’t disappeared. I still love storytelling, world-building, and exploring ideas through narrative.

But my focus has changed.

Over the past year, my creative energy has been steadily moving toward game development and digital art—not just as a hobby, but as a long-term direction. This post marks the beginning of that shift here as well.

Why Game Development?

One thing that surprised me early on was how much game development changed the way I think about creativity itself. Writing and illustration can be deeply personal and expressive, but game development constantly pushes back. The engine doesn’t care what you meant. Code either runs or it doesn’t. Assets either integrate cleanly or they don’t. That friction has been frustrating—but also clarifying. It’s forced me to slow down, be more intentional, and learn how to break big ideas into small, testable steps.

There’s also a humility to learning in public-facing tools. Tutorials make everything look smooth, but real progress happens in the gaps between them—when something breaks, when documentation contradicts itself, or when you realize you don’t yet understand a basic concept you assumed you did. Writing about those moments matters to me more than presenting polished results. They’re where real learning happens, and they’re often the parts people skip when they only show finished projects.

At its core, game development is storytelling with constraints. Unlike traditional writing, games force you to think in systems:

• How mechanics communicate meaning
• How player choice replaces exposition
• How visuals, sound, and interaction carry emotion

As someone who enjoys both art and narrative, game dev sits at the intersection of everything I care about creatively. It’s challenging, technical, and humbling—and that’s exactly why I’m drawn to it.

I’m not an expert. I’m learning from the ground up: engines, scripting, pipelines, tools, mistakes. A lot of mistakes. And that’s the part I think is worth writing about.

What This Blog Will Be Moving Forward

Going forward, this blog will primarily focus on:

Game development learning experiences

Choosing engines, following tutorials, getting stuck, getting unstuck, and understanding why things work (or don’t).

Art for games

Concept art, practice pieces, style exploration, and how art decisions change when they need to function inside a game—not just look nice on their own.

Process over polish

What it actually looks like to start from zero, juggle life responsibilities, and still build something slowly and intentionally.

This won’t be a guide written from the perspective of someone who has already “made it.” It’s a record of decisions, trade-offs, lessons learned, and progress made in real time.

If that’s useful to other beginners, great. If not, it’s still honest.

And What About Creative Writing?

Creative writing isn’t going away—it’s just no longer the main focus here.

You may still see:

• Short fiction tied to world-building ideas
• Narrative experiments connected to game concepts
• Occasional standalone pieces when something needs to be written
• Storytelling is still part of how I think. It just now shares space with code, design documents, sketches, and half-finished prototypes.

Why Write About This Publicly?

Because learning in isolation is easy to abandon.

Writing forces clarity. It exposes gaps in understanding. It creates accountability—not in a performative way, but in a “this matters enough to document” way.

This blog is no longer a collection of disconnected creative pieces. It’s becoming a working journal of building something new, one step at a time.

If you’re also learning, struggling, restarting, or pivoting creatively—you’re welcome to follow along.

The next posts will get more specific. Less philosophy, more doing.

This is the starting line.