One year back, my only thought would be:

Whoa, that’s so cool, look at all that power.

But today my thoughts are:

Whoa, that would require a lot of clutch plates to drive all that torque (a fluid clutch system would be too inefficient in this case). The gear box would probably be huge as well. I wonder whether a flywheel would be effective here since the load isn’t applied continuously.

I’ve learnt a lot over the course of just one year.

A year ago I was standing at a crossroad. My childhood dream was to be an inventor, designing some crazy contraption that would change the world. But something else got hold of me. I started dabbling in making (somewhat crappy) video games, and it was fun. It also didn’t involve using heavy tools either, meaning I didn’t have to spend half my free time trying not to get caught, nor did it involve frantically reassembling things that I took apart – often unsuccessfully. Slowly over time the idea of being a game developer crept into my mind – it was lucrative.

So here I was with a fairly decent A-Level result and one half of me thought of game development while the other half thought of engineering. I was at an impasse. To find my answer I sat down in a quiet room and started asking myself all sorts of questions. Why do I have all these game ideas floating in my head? Why did I create this WordPress theme from scratch and spend months refining it? Why do these things interest me so much?

By thinking myself about those questions repeatedly I managed to get down to the root of my passion: I love making things. Whether it is an interactive way to tell a story, or some crazy machine that makes pizza completely on its own – as long as I was creating I felt my Zen.

And now I had a clearer picture of what I wanted in life. Picking one of the two wasn’t a terribly difficult decision any more. It simply became a matter of preference between physical and virtual – and the idea of physically holding your creation really appealed to me, so I picked mechanical engineering.

Fast forward back to the present and I have in my shelf various memorabilia like an aerodynamic, foam toy car shell.

I have no regrets.

To make matters worse, wearing glasses comes with plenty of problems, like how I have to clean them whenever a single drop of water lands on the lens. I also can’t wear over-ear headphones without discomfort. Wearing animal masks is pretty fun, but only if I stood still. My arms get sore whenever I watch a 3D film at a cinema because I have to manually support their so-called “high-tech” 3D glasses over my glasses. If I wore a welder’s mask and tried to terrorise a town with a machete, my attempts would be pathetically comedic.

So, there you are, sitting around with your fake spectacles, pretending like it’s so cool, so hip to wear glasses. Oh wait, is that a fancy looking sunglasses? One that you just simply swap out and act as if nothing happened? Dear people whose glasses don’t have real lenses, why do you mock me? Why do you make our predicament a fashion accessory? You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Please, for the sake of all sanity, stop it – or I’ll punch you – if I can find your face.

However I stayed on because it was still interesting watching them build and repair their models, with the miniature electronics and servos and all.

Then one day, one of my friends in the club turned to me and asked me to have a go at the flight simulator. I was a little reluctant but in the end I braved the embarrassment. The first few flights didn’t end well, as expected, but after some guidance I wasn’t dropping like rocks.

Fast forward a few days later and I could keep a helicopter afloat reasonably well. Feeling confident I bought myself a nice model helicopter for £30. It was an indoor coaxial that my friends suggested and it didn’t take long to get it to fly.

And then I broke the landing gear from landing too hard.

I fixed it with super glue, and then I broke it again by landing too hard. It can still fly, just that it’s unbalanced with a smashed canopy and is at risk of tipping over while landing without the landing gears. Turns out buying a model helicopter isn’t terribly expensive, it’s the combined cost of replacement parts, which add up to somewhere around half the original price.

So I’m laying off flying for now until my savings recovers, but it was a pretty fun experience.

My work on The Flying Penguin was halted mostly due to the difficulties I have in the game. The biggest problem is that the code itself isn’t that great and after two re-writes I’ve lost the willpower to do another. I feel like I should leave the game as it is and move on to something else more interesting. I might take up interest eventually but that’s unlikely because of the second biggest problem, its similarity to Penguin Learns To Fly. The whole similarity thing was an unfortunate coincidence, but since that flash game is better known, my game would forever be overshadowed by it.

I’m not entirely sure what my next game-making project would be, but given the number of ideas floating in my head, I’m sure I would come up with something eventually.