Hey everyone, this post is just a short little introduction to this new studio called Equinox Games! I'm Tyler, I'm the founder and owner of Equinox Games.
Equinox Games has been an exciting endeavor for me, albeit a little slow to get going. I originally started it back in February, and only started working on a game at the end of August. I'll be telling you all about what I've been doing since February to get things rolling here.
So, yeah, I'm Tyler. I'm a software engineer working at a robotics company right now. I have experience in embedded systems, especially in the drone space. I graduated from my university in May 2023, so I'm still relatively fresh out of school. During school, I struggled quite a lot with motivation and depression, but I was able to finally get it together for the last few semesters, ending my schooling on a pretty high note.
A huge part of the motivation problems I had dealt with had to do with the way I learn best. I typically learn best by learning about something and then doing something practical with it. As I'm sure many college graduates would agree, the college experience doesn't exactly provide a lot of opportunities for practical projects. So, while my professors talked on and on about RLC circuits and classical mechanics, I was always distracted learning new things about 3D printing, building PC's, Arduino, and Linux. The knowledge I gained from getting my hands dirty with these practical projects has stayed with me far better than anything I learned in school. The last few semesters of my Computer Science degree actually had me working on pretty practical projects, so quite a bit of knowledge from those classes has stayed with me pretty well too.
I started my career at a lab local to my school, helping with drone research that they were doing. I just worked part-time, so I was not terribly involved with the development there. It was hard to enjoy it for that reason, but as a student job, I could have done much worse.
After graduating, I found a job at another drone company. I did development on a full drone system there, which included the aircraft as well as a base radio station and a tablet application for controlling and configuring the drone. The system was very cool. However, there are lots of things that I had a hard time enjoying about the job. First, the vast majority of development on the system was done in a different office, so a lot of the time it felt like I was just picking up scraps of a project, instead of actually doing active development. Second, I had to do a lot of development in Java, and I don't really like Java. The system also used different languages like C++, Python, and even NSIS if anyone has ever heard of that. The last difficulty I had with the position is that I was on a team of 2, 3 if I'm being generous. Everyone else in the office was working on a different project, and it made it very hard to feel involved with the people at my job. After a short amount of time, I decided to move on from this position, after which I started at my current position.
I really enjoy my job now. I work on really cutting-edge robotics technology, utilizing the latest AI research and integrating it into a single application that can be retrofitted onto a variety of robots. I work on a large variety of pieces of the system. I started out as a contractor working specifically on DevOps using GitLab. About halfway through my contract, my supervisors liked me well enough to hire me on directly, and since then, I have worked on a lot of system design, as well as integrating libraries and services into the frontend and backend.
As I just mentioned, I started Equinox Games in February. This was shortly after my participation in Pirate Software Game Jam 14, where I submitted a game called Pathogen. I ended up joining the jam a week late, so this game is a product of working off-hours for a week. I had a really fun time with this experience. This was at the job that I had had a difficult time at, so during this time, I started thinking of what exactly it could be that I would actually enjoy working on. Working on Pathogen was kind of an awakening moment for me, because I really enjoyed the time I spent working on Pathogen.
I soon after decided that I would take the steps to make something of my newfound desire to make games. I started an LLC, since I had planned on doing the whole thing solo, and an LLC would be perfectly sufficient to protect me legally if anything should go awry.
I also decided that I wanted to host things locally, rather than paying monthly for various hosting services and SAAS applications. I will be the first to admit that this was very much overkill for a solo endeavor for making games, but I was absolutely determined to "DO THIS RIGHT!". I think you will see that this is a consistent theme going forward.
I started reading some books on game development, to see what more there was for me to learn. One of these books was Game Programming Patterns, by Robert Nystrom. This is a ridiculously excellent book that I recommend to everyone doing anything on the technical side of game development. However, it also inspired me to create my own game engine. (I was once again determined to "DO THIS RIGHT!") I wrote something that actually worked all right, and it was really fun to write up. However, I could see immediately that developing a game with it was going to take a very long time, with how low-level the engine was.
I started my first game project with this engine, which was a rework of Pathogen, my game for the game jam. I gave up on it pretty shortly, though it may come back eventually. It was going to be a twin-stick shooter roguelike, where your character grows in power as more of the map gets corrupted by you. The design of it was coming along pretty well, but as I mentioned above, working on games with my game engine took a very long time.
I took a break from Pathogen to start getting my servers ready for Equinox Games. I wanted to have several services available for use at Equinox Games, along with a few for my family to use. I decided on using GitLab for source control and CI, NextCloud for local cloud storage, Leantime for project management. Adding services quickly began to spin out of control, though.
As I started working on adding these services to my server, I realized that I wanted to be able to connect to my services with a hostname. This means I would need a reverse proxy to be able to connect to different services through my single server. I chose Traefik. Then, I needed a local DNS server to redirect these hostnames (Unbound and PiHole). This pattern kept going, and now I have a ton of services running on my server, and it took me the entirety of summer to get it all done.
This brings us to August. I once again joined the Pirate Software Game Jam, this time teaming up with some of my brothers. This showed me the difficulty of working on a team as opposed to solo, but it also showed me the increased potential that working with a team could bring. I decided to set aside my pride, and team up with some people to make my first real game.
I teamed up with a couple of my brothers and a long-time friend of mine. Together, we came up with several ideas for games we could make, after deciding on:
The Gamble of Gunther Pine
This game is something I'm very excited about! I think you will be too, as our development continues along. Sign up for our email list and join our Discord for updates as we move along! I'll see you next time!