Welcome to CHUSOFT!
Hi, my name is Keegan Chua!
If you stumbled on this, congratulations. For the time being I'm going to keep this venture relatively low-key. I'm calling it CHUSOFT, which is very very clever wordplay combining my last name Chua + Software. Please clap.
I. What is this?
TL;DR I'm making a game.
I'm interested in using this space as a hub for posting about my personal project, tentatively codenamed Project Meteorite. This started as a game jam project that I worked on during the summer of 2024 at my day job, and over the last year and change has wiggled its way deeper into my heart and mind.
II. Backstory
You see, the core premise of this project took hold during a rather turbulent period of time. In early 2024 one of our cats, Jupiter, tragically and abruptly passed away. This was after a few years of ups and downs with his health that we had managed to stabilize for a while, and gave him a few more good years of love. Then...not too long after this...our senior dog, Lily, was diagnosed with cancer. She was nearly 17 years old, and because of her age and other complications with her heart, we had to say goodbye to her a few months after we did Jupiter.
During this whole period of time I had started laying out ideas for what would later get turned into a pitch deck for Project Meteorite. I wanted to make a game that paid tribute to my pets. My buddies. My close companions that my wife brought into my life when we started dating, and who kept me sane during COVID lockdowns. I wanted to do something for them, so I took a look back on some sketches I had made in my sketchbook a few months prior over Christmas 2023.
That version won't see the light of day, because since then it has transformed into a solo dev project, because I'm more or less going at this alone with the support of my wife with narrative and world-building. It's going to be something that is less ambitious in scope, but in the end more meaningful for me (and her) to create.
III. A Call to Adventure
As part of this journey I'm teaching myself a lot - how to use a new game engine (GameMaker), how to make pixel art, how to code, how to design a game, how to do business, etc.
I'm not walking into this totally out of my depth. I've been working in the game industry for 10+ years at this point (I feel old saying this). Most of them spent working on AAA games as a UI/UX Designer. During my time in the industry I grew to deeply love the work of designing UI, and the obstacle course of challenges and technical conundrums it presents to be solved, but I've also longed to work on my own projects on the side. I just never had the drive or the gumption to tackle anything remotely of the scope of my own indie game.
If the last few years of watching aspects of the game industry buckle under its own weight have told me anything, it's that maybe now is the time to hedge my bets and try betting on myself.
IV. So Why A Blog?
This devlog is my attempt at keeping myself honest. By speaking its existence into the ether, I'm putting my name and reputation out there to get something done for a project that has been gnawing at me relentlessly for years at this point. As someone with adult diagnosed ADHD who absolutely will procrastinate on something unless there's a deadline, by making it something official I will without a doubt be more inclined to force myself to work on it. But this is also a moonlight project, I still have a job. So having a space to talk about the work, even if it's just refactoring collision code, will help motivate me to keep working on this over nights and weekends when I have time.
The turbulence of 2024 also saw me become more of a hermit than I already was. And I'd like to share things with those curious enough to participate. Friends, family, co-workers. I don't have delusions of grandeur, this is going to be a years long endeavor with a lot of unknowns that simply can't be planned for. I mean, hey, that's game dev - if you know, you know. But this is also my attempt to put myself back out there in a public way since I've more or less retreated from all social media platforms for my own mental health.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
- KC