Start here / Project overview
What Graves is—and why I’m making it.
Graves is a live-event AV simulator, but this journal is really about learning how to make a game without disappearing into the idea of one.
I’ve wanted to make a game for a long time. My usual mistake is starting with something enormous, getting lost in the world around it, and never reaching the part where the game becomes playable. Graves is my attempt to work differently.
The game is based on a world I understand: live-event AV. You arrive at a job, unload the gear, set it up, connect everything, solve the problems, run the event, and pack it back out. I know that work. Game development is the part I’m learning.
The first playable
The first version is deliberately small: one room, a projector, a screen, two speakers, a mixer, a couple of microphones, a laptop, and one or two problems to diagnose. That is enough to find out whether the core idea works before I build a much larger world around it.
What belongs in this journal
This is the personal side of the project. It follows decisions, experiments, setbacks, small victories, and the honest state of the build. Entries are chronological so there is always a beginning and a clear path forward.
The Learning Adventures are different. They are structured, step-by-step instructional chapters created from the systems I’ve worked through. They live in their own textbook-style library so the journal never turns into a manual and the manual never pretends to be a diary.