I've always wanted to make a computer game. I got my two cents by Ants (Mravenci), but I had many other ideas.
In my early programmer years I had a bunch of games in my head and after some time some of them started to be quite thinked out. Unfortunately I didn't have the skills to bring it to life, I tried and failed many times in many programming languages.
When a decade passed by with no signs of completing any of them, I decided to take good parts from all of them and put them into a single game, which I will finish. I thought about a perfect main character and decided to go with a simple sphere. It will be easy to make, with lower polygon count than person or creature (although a nice sphere is often quite hi-poly) and it can roll really fast, which can alter as a car ride.
In 2013 I attended MS Fest in Prague and saw Tomáš Slavíček's
lecture about MonoGame (follow-up of dead XNA), so I gave it a try. It was OK, but still... making 3D game was beyond my skills. I kept it in 2D, but wanted 3D inside. MonoGame was exactly what I wanted and I started to see how complicated making of a 3D game is. Keeping the code small is absolutely impossible. The same problem I had with WebGL, which was a hot topic at that time.
I didn't want to use some pre-made 3D engine or game makers, because I saw some of them and they felt overcomplicated, with many features I probably won't use or need and will run slowly on some machines.
During that time I thought about a name for the game. I somehow decided all stuff I do will start with "Q" and I many, many years ago I felt in love with a name of an old Czech game "Koules" (for UNIX, OS/2 and Linux). It's plural of "koule", which means "sphere" in Czech. I like the fusion of a Czech word with English grammar. After many variations I ended up with "Quly" (and "Qule" for the spheres).
About two years after my tries with XNA my younger brother showed Unity. It was quite funny, when I described my idea of the game to him and he put the RollerBall Character into the scene, which was pretty much it :-) My first tries were OK, but I was quite lost and didn't really know how to do stuff. I was otherwise engaged at that time, so I decided to continue when Unity 5 is out.
The release happened few months later. I really appreciated YouTube tutorials, especially those from Unity team itself. Unfortunately, some of them still used legacy features, which has been often replaced by newer approaches in Unity 5. Later I often followed the tutorial and spend few hours of fiddling and tweaking, but ultimately (and often accidentally) found out it's legacy and therefore not recommended for a new game. Damn!
My brother gave me a nice jump-start and I started to build a learning version of Quly. I always do it this way, so I'm not affraid to mess it up, because for the real thing I'll start again from scratch.
Thanks to great capabilities of Unity I was able to concentrate on gameplay and features only. Many things are already made, like collisions, physics, vector maths and tons and tons of other stuff, so I didn't need to bother with them (for example in XNA I had to deal with all of them).
I realized how foolish I was for rejecting pre-made 3D engines. I'll never be good enough to make an optimized game engine by myself! There's such vast amount of things it needs to be done and of course done properly.
In Unity I simply make a short script, attach it to a GameObject and test it. It's really fast, straight forward and I love it! Also, C# is my favorite programming language and the system of scripts and stuff in Unity really suits me. And cooperation with my favorite 3D software of all times, Trimble SketchUp Make, puts me on cloud nine! :-)
