About me

I’m James, and I’m building the town I grew up in

I was born in Nottingham in 1976 and I have lived in Britain every day since. Second Chance is a British open-world life sim set in Oakhaven, a Midlands town I invented out of the one I grew up in — and that is the whole qualification, really. I am not researching this country. I am describing it.

This page is the honest answer to the other question everybody asks a solo developer: when on earth do you do it?

The short version

• WhoJames. One person, working solo. There is no studio behind this and no publisher in front of it.
• WhereNottingham. Born here in 1976, and here ever since.
• WhatSecond Chance — a first-person open-world life sim, built in Unreal Engine 5.8 and Blender.
• WhenAround a day job and the third year of a university degree. Evenings, early mornings, and a good deal of it while I am somewhere else entirely.
• On whatA Windows PC with 8 GB of video memory — held to deliberately, so the game runs on an ordinary machine rather than on a good one.
• ExperienceThis is my first game. When I started I had never opened Unreal Engine in my life.

The day job I will keep to myself, which I hope you will allow me. The degree is hardly a hobby either — I am in the third year at university, doing it as a degree apprenticeship, sponsored through a government scheme set up to get more people properly qualified in the line of work I am already in. I am, it is fair to say, somewhat past the age most people picture when you say the word apprentice.

So the honest picture is a full working week, a degree sitting on top of it, and a town being built in the gaps between the two.

I have been trying to do this since about 1989

My first computer was a BBC Micro. After that an Atari ST, and after that a PC, which is more or less where I have stayed. Half my friends had Spectrums, and we all held firm views about whose machine was better, every one of them arrived at without evidence.

As a teenager I was a member of a computer club, and I tried to make games there. They were terrible. That is the honest word for them — a teenager with a manual and more enthusiasm than method, working on a machine with less memory than this sentence takes up. What I could picture in my head and what I could get onto the screen were separated by about thirty-five years of hardware.

The club itself was held in a school, of an evening. While the adults were busy at the machines, we ran about the grounds and the corridors with a ghetto blaster playing whatever 1980s tape was in it. A school at night, when you are that age, is a genuinely spooky building, and it has stayed with me — I suspect it is why this game keeps finding its way underground, into a cave network and a well you can climb down, rather than sticking to the daylight.

The adults, for their part, were mostly copying one another’s games onto blank disks and swapping them about, which is what an evening at a computer club largely consisted of in those days. I am fairly confident the statute of limitations has run out.

Unreal Engine, a modern Nvidia card and an AI that can do the typing have closed a gap I had assumed would stay open for good. Second Chance is the game that teenager was trying to describe, and could not.

How this actually gets made

Here is the part that surprises people, so I will put it plainly: I build this game by directing an AI agent, and it does the work while I am at my job, at the gym, cooking, eating or asleep. I decide what gets built and how it should look, I say when something is wrong, and I keep saying it until it is right. The agent does the typing.

It writes the marketing too. The site you are reading, the devlog, the residents’ newspaper you can pick up off your own doormat in the game — that is all part of the same arrangement. I still read every word of it before it goes out, which is why this paragraph exists.

Two things changed how the work goes, and they are worth naming because they are rarely written up from real solo experience:

• A second editor server. For a long time progress was slow, because only one tool could reach into Unreal. Adding a second one that could get at particles, interface work, animation, audio and the editor’s own scripting suddenly made things a lot easier, and it retired three standing rules that used to begin “the human has to do this bit by hand”.
• Writing down every trap the moment I pay for it. The project keeps a file of verified recipes and known silent failures, organised by symptom as well as by task. Every entry in it cost an evening once. It has made things enormously easier, and the compounding effect of that is the single best decision I have made on this project.

I keep an eye on it from my phone while I am out. A lot of days look like this.

• BreakfastThe machine is finishing a job it started overnight. I have my cereal.
• DayThe day job, or the course. I check in between things.
• GymA run on the treadmill, or a swim, or 10,000 steps round the local rec — checking on the build from my phone while I walk.
• EveningCooking something, and this is where most of the actual directing happens: looking at what came back, and saying what is wrong with it.
• LateThe last render goes on, and I go to bed while it runs.

One day in September I sat through my own third-year university induction while, back at the flat, the game rendered the induction film that plays on the player’s first morning on the bins. I sat in a room being inducted while a computer across town built a room to induct somebody else in. I promise you I did not arrange that.

Sundays usually involve a video call to Rotterdam. My brother moved out there a few years back and is engaged now, with two children, so there is plenty to catch up on; my parents live near me and pile into the same call. Somebody always has the Forest match on in the background, and everybody insists they are listening to the conversation.

Why the detail is worth it

Open X on any given evening and the biggest game in the world is being taken apart a frame at a time — an awkward backflip, a hand not quite touching a car door. My feed is full of it. If people will do that to a studio with thousands of staff, they will certainly do it to me, so the answer is to get the small things right: the position of a foot on the pavement, the exact angle a wheelie bin sits at while it is being pushed.

Characters are the most expensive thing of all. There is a driver in the induction film who is on screen for twelve seconds, and getting his body reading right for his lines took an evening. He is worth it, because anyone who takes the fly-tipping job is going to be spending a lot of time with him and he is full of banter.

And some of it I simply cannot get from a screen. A friend of mine, Durrell, is a refuse loader by trade. He came round, and I asked him how a bin lifter actually works. He could not tell me. He has done the job for years, watched the thing happen thousands of times, and he sat there struggling to put it into words — so I gave him a pen and paper, and he drew it. Then another mate found a video of one working, which confirmed the drawing and made the whole thing click at once.

The answer was that our tipping action was running in reverse, and that there needed to be a bar at the top for the bin to strike, because that impact is what tips it out. Twenty minutes later it was fixed and it looked perfect. Just like real life. Durrell is credited on this game as Refuse Operative Advisor, and he also told me our hi-vis was the wrong colour, which it was.

Oakhaven is invented out of a real place

Oakhaven is invented. Nottingham is not, and that is where every bit of it comes from. Nearly fifty years of living in one country, most of it on the same streets, turns out to be the single most useful qualification a person can bring to a British life sim — more useful, I would argue, than anything I have learned about Unreal Engine.

You cannot look most of this up. The brick and the road markings you can. The way a pelican crossing beeps, the exact gaudiness of a pub carpet, how a chip shop smells at half four on a wet Tuesday, what a wheelie bin sounds like being dragged over a kerb, the way the light goes at four in the afternoon in November, the fact that the streetlamps go half-dim at ten because the council is saving money — that comes from having been here for it. Most of the terraces were built off photographs taken round the corner from my front door.

I live in the city centre, so I also get the full experience: people shouting outside at two in the morning, and me lying there unable to have the window open. That has gone into the game as well, in its way. A town you can hear through a window is a town that is actually there.

I put the things in that I like about living here. The streetlamps go half-dim at ten at night, because that is what the council actually does to save money. The pub has a gaudy patterned carpet, on purpose. The chip shop is called Chish & Fips. If you have lived somewhere like Radworth you will know within about ten seconds whether I have got it right, and if I have got something wrong I would genuinely like to be told.

The watch, and why it is in the devlog

I bought a Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 to keep an eye on my heart rate and stay healthy, and it has turned into part of how I work. Some days it pushes me into a longer run; some days it sets a ceiling and I drop to a walk whenever my heart rate climbs past 135. It also tracks stress, and I log the reading with each devlog entry alongside what I was actually doing at the time.

I keep it in public for the same reason I keep the bugs in public: a devlog where everything works and everyone is fine is a devlog that reads as fiction.

Where the devlog’s voice came from

My mum is reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and it turned out — entirely by coincidence — to be a novel about making games. I went and researched it properly: what people love about it, and what the critics complained about. The devlog’s current style came out of that. I am not copying the book. I took the craft, treated the criticisms as instructions, and set the whole thing in my own East Midlands register. If you enjoy the devlog you will probably enjoy the novel, so there it is, named once, as a favour to you.

The bit I am supposed to leave out

I have no idea yet whether anyone will want to play this.

I messaged a mate about it — about how twenty-four hours had gone into one bin round — and he said people will love it and I can stop worrying. Which was kind of him.

Until strangers on the internet show some real interest, cautiously optimistic is where I am staying. That is the honest position and I would rather write it down than pretend to a confidence I have yet to earn. If you have read this far, you are one of the strangers, and you are extremely welcome.

Come and watch it get built

Everything goes up as it happens, wrong turns included — the broken animations, the buildings hovering a foot off the ground, the four-hour hunt for a bug that turned out to be a single number the wrong way round. It is meant to be genuinely useful to anyone building something similar, which is why the headings are the symptoms rather than the diagnoses.

• The devlog — the written version, with the technical detail bolted to the end of each story.
• The YouTube channel — the moving version.
• The build tracker — what all this has actually cost, in public.
• The Oakhaven Gazette — the town’s own newspaper, which is fiction, and which lands on your mat in the game every week.

If you want to say something to me, email me. I read all of it myself, because there is only me to read it. “That’s not how the bins work round our way” remains the most useful thing anybody has ever sent.

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