My eight year old nephew is currently my boss.
A couple years ago he found out that I make video games, and when I was back home for Christmas he approached me with a business plan to build a game. He was a model professional. He had a collection of papers that contained blueprints and concept art and storylines and the names of all thirteen towns the main character would visit during his adventure. There would be 30 levels, and soldiers and villagers and blob monsters that were made of lightning and fire. The main character's name would be George. And in case you were wondering, no that is not my nephew's name, and no I do not know where he got it from. The name of the game would be George and the Dragns (with no 'o').
When he approached me with his business plan I was unfortunately coming off a bit of a low in my game dev journey. I had just spent the better part of three months trying to build the beginnings of a little cute Halloween game in Godot. I made a couple devlogs about it, put in very long days, made cool art, learned so much, BUT this was in the midst of the next Godot major version release and I had decided I wanted to build the whole project in 4.0. A humdinger of a mistake.
For the first long while of Godot 4.0's life it was fairly unstable and HTML exports did not work, which were the exclusive export format I worked with. Native desktop exports work fine for many games, but I always felt like it was a security risk downloading those types of games myself, and for whatever reason I felt unwaveringly committed to not going down that route. Retrospectively maybe it was silly I felt this way, but the broken HTML export was a deal breaker on game dev for me. That paired with picking up a non-game dev project with some friends and eventually deciding it was time to get back into the programming job market, lead to game dev sliding into the dusty shadows where many of my other hobbies hang out.
Fast-forward almost two years later. I've been back in town near this nephew for the last month or so, and almost every time I see him he still asks me about the game. He doesn't even remember what the game is about, but he still asks about it in the sweetest, "Hey, um Jaz, um no worries if you haven't worked on it yet, but um, how's the game going" way. His consistency has been inspiring, and it got me looking into where Godot was at these days. Wouldn't you believe they fixed the HTML exports shortly after I took a break from it.
Picking up game dev again has felt intimidating, but all the random stuff I learned a couple years ago has started to come back. Just like pedaling around on a rusty bike that you gotta think so hard your brain might explode to ride. In a little over a week I had a rough game loop of George and the Dragns.
I went for a Vampire Survivors type game because the controls are simple enough for an eight year old to get the hang of pretty quickly, and what eight year old doesn't like killing hoards and hoards of monsters. It also seemed like the mechanics would be easier to implement so development could happen faster (but only in theory though, because I've gotta periodically scrap with a horribly annoying perfectionist). I loved the drawings my nephew had made, so I digitized and animated the main character George out of those.
A fun fact about Geoerge is that he's a knight, which should be obvious from his armor and shield and sword. My nephew is adamant that George will also need to start the game with dual 22 pistols. I've asked him several times if they even had guns back when knights existed, and he always deflects by very quickly describing some new upgrade George could have, like the ability to call upon legions of military-grade trucks that drop grenades. So, I guess George is gonna have that.
The HTML export works great from Godot now, so George and the Dragns is on my itch.io page. It's a work in progress, but so am I, so don't expect much of anything. And don't worry nephew, I never forgot about you. I've just been a little slow getting back around to things.