At the beginning of 2021, I had no intention whatsoever of writing a game. Like everybody else on the planet, I was way too busy worrying about everything that was going on. I was one of the lucky ones and didn't go through furlough or lose my job, and I was plenty busy at work. As a family with two kids, we did find entertainment in games, and one in particular this year caught our eye more than any other. That game was Subnautica: Below Zero, and it had us absolutely engrossed. I quickly found a VR mod for it, and we enjoyed it all over again in VR. It is an amazing game! My kids enjoyed it, and we would chat about it over dinner. They would come up with "improvements" to the game, like supercharged subs and new beasties to encounter. Having found the VR mod on a site called Nexus Mods, I soon got to looking to see if the kid's ideas had already been thought of, and maybe already had their own mods out there. Well, the landscape was bare, and so I thought to myself - I wonder how hard it is to mod Subnautica? This was the beginning of my journey to Unity.

There's an active and vibrant Subnautica modding community over on Discord, and I started picking the brains of the regular's on the modding channels. I found that Subnautica was built in Unity, and that the main language of Unity was C#. Good start, I thought, as I'd spend some time many years back building C# tools for various projects I'd worked on, so have a decent knowledge of the language. I had a look at some of the mods on Nexus and some of them shared their source on Github, so I took to looking at how other folks had made cool changes. Within a couple of months, I'd installed Visual Studio and churned out a couple of mods - a speed boost mod, a fish scoop, a repair and dock mod and a pet mod. Modding had become a lot of fun, and I filled the lockdown evenings with tweaks and changes, as well as writing a beginners guide with my newfound friends on Discord. The kids were loving it, as they got all the things they wanted in Subnautica, and we had a lot of fun coming up with ideas.

As I worked on more and more in-depth mods, I started to learn the parlance of Unity. start and update methods, co-routines, components, came objects, vectors, raycasts. I started to think I might actually understand this stuff! Being a bit old school, the concept of component-oriented design over more familiar (to me, anyway) concepts of inheritance took a while to settle in, but I got there. The kids and I had talked about more and more complex mods for Subnautica, and one day we started talking about, "what if we made our own game?", what would it do, who would it star, what would the world and creatures be like? So I downloaded Unity, bought a book (not an ebook, a proper paper book) on Unity programming and had a go. It's a mind-boggling thing to start, especially when you're old like me where there's no more room in my brain to learn new stuff! But I persevered. built something, broke it, started again, build something, broke it, and so on and so on. All the while the kids are sharing these crazy ideas about giant spiders, a warrior, a princess, treasure. Then I discovered the Unity Asset Store. Well blow me, all my Christmases had come at once! A couple of quid here and there, I had my characters, I had my treasure chest, and by golly I had me some big hairy spider enemies! And so it went and continues to go, to this very day.

Every day is a learning day with Unity. I have re-started this project more times than I can count, encountered more issues, conundrums, challenges than I dare admit, and have truly learned to fear the words "Null reference". But it has been fun, and continues to be fun, while we explore and create and test and destroy and build it all over again. The kids love it too, and word has got out that we're "making a game". That's half the reason I've put it on itch, so the kid's mates can download it and play. It's not much, and far from perfect, but we'll keep at it and who knows, one day...